Excerpts

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“Any Such Starship Would Have To Carry A Minimum Of 10,000 People To Secure The Success Of The Endeavor”

April 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Maybe we could colonize Mars with a relatively small community of pioneers. Not so another solar system. In that case, the mass would be critical. From Sarah Fecht at Popular Mechanics:

“Back in 2002, John Moore, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, calculated that a starship could leave Earth with 150 passengers on a 2000-year pilgrimage to another solar system, and upon arrival, the descendants of the original crew could colonize a new world there—as long as everyone was careful not to inbreed along the way.

It was a valiant attempt to solve a thorny question about the future of humans in space. The nearest star systems—such as our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from home—are so far that reaching them would require a generational starship. Entire generations of people would be born, live, and die before the ship reached its destination. This brings up the question of how many people you need to send on a hypothetical interstellar mission to sustain sufficient genetic diversity. And a new study sets the bar much higher than Moore’s 150 people.

According to Portland State University anthropologist Cameron Smith, any such starship would have to carry a minimum of 10,000 people to secure the success of the endeavor. And a starting population of 40,000 would be even better, in case a large percentage of the population died during during the journey.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“We Often Think Of Insects As Tiny Automata—Robots With Everything Built-In And Programmed”

April 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

While plant and insect brains may not be as complicated as human ones, they’re very complex and likely resemble our processes more than we commonly believe. From Oliver Sacks in the New York Review of Books:

“Where Aplysia has only 20,000 neurons distributed in ganglia throughout its body, an insect may have up to a million nerve cells, all concentrated in one brain, and despite its tiny size may be capable of extraordinary cognitive feats. Thus bees are expert in recognizing different colors, smells, and geometric shapes presented in a laboratory setting, as well as systematic transformations of these. And of course, they show superb expertise in the wild or in our gardens, where they recognize not only the patterns and smells and colors of flowers, but can remember their locations and communicate these to their fellow bees.

It has even been shown, in a highly social species of paper wasp, that individuals can learn and recognize the faces of other wasps. Such face learning has hitherto been described only in mammals; it is fascinating that a cognitive power so specific can be present in insects as well.

We often think of insects as tiny automata—robots with everything built-in and programmed. But it is increasingly evident that insects can remember, learn, think, and communicate in quite rich and unexpected ways. Much of this, doubtless, is built-in—but much, too, seems to depend on individual experience.

Whatever the case with insects, there is an altogether different situation with those geniuses among invertebrates, the cephalopods, consisting of octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. Here, as a start, the nervous system is much larger—an octopus may have half a billion nerve cells distributed between its brain and its ‘arms’ (a mouse, by comparison, has only 75 to 100 million). There is a remarkable degree of organization in the octopus brain, with dozens of functionally distinct lobes in the brain and similarities to the learning and memory systems of mammals.”

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“The Phenomenon Is Crossing Over From Soft Goods In Virtual Space To Physical Goods In The Brick-And-Mortar World”

April 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hell is other people, but if they own a pied–à–terre in Manhattan, you might upgrade them to purgatory.

The virtual advantages of the online world are being leveraged more and more offline, and not just in high-tech ways like with 3-D printers. Case in point: Airbnb, which has increased the inventory of lodgings without building a thing. It’s a knowledge share that becomes a physical one. It allows the non-professional to quantify the landscape and take advantage of otherwise hidden opportunities, though there may be some drawbacks. From Jeremy Rifkin’s Los Angeles Times op-ed about the company and the broader sharing economy:

“It’s not difficult to see why the service has soared in value. For a traditional hotel chain to add another room to its inventory, the room must be built or acquired, at a significant cost. Airbnb can add another room to its inventory at almost no cost, since its website is already up and running.

Private enterprises have every incentive to reduce their marginal costs. Doing so means they can increase profits, offer goods and services at a lower price, or both. But now the Internet and other innovations have reduced marginal costs to near zero for some commodities and services, which has left many traditional companies reeling.

The zero marginal cost phenomenon has sowed a path of destruction across the recording and information industries over the last decade, as millions of consumers began to produce and share music, video, news and knowledge with one another on the Internet at near zero marginal cost. This phenomenon has weakened revenues in the music industry, newspaper and publishing fields, and the book publishing industry.

Now, as we are seeing with Airbnb, the phenomenon is crossing over from soft goods in virtual space to physical goods in the brick-and-mortar world.”

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“How Afraid Should Workers Be Of These New Technologies?”

April 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not that we’re entering a post-jobs world but one where automation, along with other economic factors, may make for permanently higher unemployment levels. Many types of work will vanish and not everyone will be suited for the new normal. Not all clerks can become nurses. From Tyler Cowen in the New York Times:

“How afraid should workers be of these new technologies? There is reason to be skeptical of the assumption that machines will leave humanity without jobs. After all, history has seen many waves of innovation and automation, and yet as recently as 2000, the rate of unemployment was a mere 4 percent. There are unlimited human wants, so there is always more work to be done. The economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that even unskilled workers can gain from selling their services, thereby liberating the more skilled workers for more productive tasks.

Nonetheless, technologically related unemployment — or, even worse, the phenomenon of people falling out of the labor force altogether because of technology — may prove a tougher problem this time around.

Labor markets just aren’t as flexible these days for workers, especially for men at the bottom end of the skills distribution.”

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“Mastery Of These Technologies Confers Enormous Power On Those Who Have It”

April 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From John Naughton’s Guardian article about Michael Lewis’ new book which reveals computerized Wall Street chicanery, a passage about how technology, that supposed equalizer, can in fact tip the balance of the digital scales:

“This is a good illustration of one of the central problems that society will have to address in the coming decades: the collision between analogue mindsets and digital realities.

Software is pure ‘thought-stuff.’ The only resource needed to produce it is human intelligence and expertise. This has two implications. The first is that attempting to regulate the things that it creates is like trying to catch quicksilver using a butterfly net.

The Edward Snowden disclosures about the US National Security Agency have revealed how difficult it is to bring this stuff under effective democratic control. Lewis’s account of how high-frequency trader geeks have run rings around the regulators suggests that much the same holds true in civilian life. This technology can easily run out of control.

The second implication is that what one might call the politics of expertise will become much more important. Mastery of these technologies confers enormous power on those who have it. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that. So in addition to wondering who will guard the guardians, we may have to start thinking about who is going to guard the geeks.”

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“POW! Two Unrelated Ideas, Adolescent Cruelty And Telekinesis, Came Together, And I Had An Idea …”

April 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In a Guardian piece, Stephen King recalls how two disparate thoughts crashed together in his head, allowing him to create his first novel, Carrie, 40 years ago. The opening:

“While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High. For part of one summer I worked there, too. One day I was supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached.

This memory came back to me one day while I was working in the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the other girls – grossed out, horrified, amused – start pelting her with sanitary napkins … The girl begins to scream. All that blood!

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena – telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first —

POW! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea …”

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“Crucially–And Bizarrely–They Are Interested In Everything”

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

Ken Jennings, the former Jeopardy! champ who offers that Trebek smells like “knowledge and Old Spice,” explains in a Reddit AMA why some people are really good at the game. Amusingly (and appropriately), his user name for the Q&A sessions was “watsonsbitch.” His answer:

“Question:

How do you memorize the trivia and facts you’ve learned over the years?

Ken Jennings:

Almost without exception, the know-it-alls you see on Jeopardy are not Rain Man-style savants. They don’t sit at home memorizing the almanac. They are just interested in things. Crucially–and bizarrely–THEY ARE INTERESTED IN EVERYTHING.

Think about how easy it is to remember a fact when you’re interested in the subject. You don’t have to actively study lyrics of songs you like or names of players on your favorite team or characters on your TV show (unless it’s Game of Thrones, I guess). That stuff just sticks. We are wired to remember stuff effortlessly…if we want to.

So for better or for worse, it’s mostly a question of motivation. If you can convince yourself that a subject is interesting, facts will start to stay. That’s my theory anyway.”

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“You Could Have A Projector That Displays Your Next Series Of Plays On Your Helmet”

April 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a really fun TED interview by Brooke Borel about the intersection of science and sports with former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, journalist David Epstein (The Sports Gene) and scientist Cynthia Bir, thoughts from the kicker about augmented and virtual reality:

“Question:

With Google Glass, how do you see that technology changing the landscape of football—and other sports—in the future?

Chris Kluwe: 

I think it will initially shift the viewing perspective. People will now have another way to watch the game—from the athlete’s perspective. It’ll no longer be just the overhead cameras and the sweeping Skycam— you’ll actually be able to see what your favorite player did on the play from his or her perspective. That’s something that we’ve never really had up to this point.

From there, it leads to people becoming more comfortable with the idea of things like augmented reality and virtual reality, which leads into that being adopted more and more into everyday life. In the sporting world, that means augmented reality being adopted into the actual sports themselves. For football, you could have a projector that displays your next series of plays on your helmet as you’re running back to the huddle. Or something that highlights the receiver, or warns you if a guy is coming off your blind spot, for instance tackling against quarterback.

You see this a lot in the military—on displays in fighter jets, and I think they’re working on actual ground-based troop systems as well—there’s this filter of information between you and the world, an additional layer of information that you can use to enhance your own senses. I think we’re at that point right now where not a lot of people realize that, just like not a lot of people realized that the Internet was going to be something that spread and covered the entire world, or that cell phones would be as ubiquitous. No one even thinks of not having a cell phone, but there was a point when cell phones were big briefcase, clunky things that only executives on Wall Street had.”

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“Animal Planet Will Get Really Boring”

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

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released this week was, wow, dreadful. The New Yorker blog posted an excerpt from Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2013 reaction to an early version of the findings that were leaked. An excerpt about the death of diversity, which may include you and I or the next generations of us:

“As bad as things look for humans, the prognosis for non-humans is, in many ways, worse. Under all the scenarios that the I.P.C.C. panel considered, including an implausible one in which the world imposes drastic limits on carbon emissions right now, a ‘large fraction’ of terrestrial and freshwater species face elevated extinction risks. Under the most likely scenarios, many species ‘will not be able to move fast enough during the 21st century to track suitable climates’, and there is a chance that some ecosystems, including the Arctic tundra and the Amazon rainforest, will undergo ‘abrupt and irreversible change.’ Forests are already dying back in some parts of the world because of warming-related stress, and more forests are likely to follow suit as temperatures continue to rise. As Grist put it in a summary of the findings, ‘Animal Planet will get really boring.’

As it happens, the very same day the I.P.C.C. report was leaked, President Obama issued an executive order titled ‘Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change.’ Among other things, it established a new Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, to be co-chaired by the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and—suggestively enough—the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

Promoting ‘preparedness’ is doubtless a good idea. As the executive order notes, climate impacts—which include, but are not limited to, heat waves, heavier downpours, and an increase in the number and intensity of wildfires—are ‘already affecting communities, natural resources, ecosystems, economies, and public health across the Nation.’ However, one of the dangers of this enterprise is that it tends to presuppose, in a Boy Scout-ish sort of way, that ‘preparedness’ is possible.'”

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“Those That Treat Their Core Territory In A Rational Manner…Get Wiped Out”

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

In an Aeon essay “Russia’s Sacred Land,” Peter Turchin, father of Cliodynamics, looks at psychology on a national scale, examining its irrational yet evolutionary underpinnings. In doing so, he downplays the role of Putin in the annexation of Crimea. An excerpt:

“States often behave in an opportunistic manner, grabbing real estate when they can and giving it up when the cost of holding it becomes too great. In 1732, Russia returned a large chunk of Persian territory that Peter the Great had conquered in the previous decade. In return, the Persians entered an alliance with the Russians against the Ottoman Empire. This kind of behaviour is well-described by realism. However, most states, historical and modern, also put some territory into a special category, one that is not subject to rational geopolitical calculation. Such land is ‘sacred’. It must be held at all costs.

Here we find an obvious manifestation of the bourgeois strategy in the hawk-dove game. States and populations that are willing to escalate conflict as far as necessary in defence of their sacred lands are more likely to persist in the international arena. Those that treat their core territory in a rational manner – forfeiting it in accordance with strategic imperatives, as, for example, several Germanic tribes did repeatedly during the Migration Period – get wiped out. As a result, we observe the coevolution of geopolitics and what the anthropologist Scott Atran has identified as ‘sacred values’. Geopolitical assets acquire an aura of sanctity.”

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“Pixels Really Weren’t That Far Removed From Other Forms Of Art — Some Of Which Dated Back Thousands Of Years”

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

From bombs to trash cans, the initial Apple icons were created by artist Susan Kare, who stumbled into the brand new career path. Zachary Crockett of Priceonomics has an interview with the computer graphics pioneer. An excerpt:

“Kare was subsequently offered a fixed-length, part-time job designing fonts and icons for the Apple Macintosh; her business card read ‘HI Macintosh artist.’ She’d never worked on computer graphics before Apple, but quickly made strides to adjust to her new medium. ‘I remember I didn’t really know anything about digital typography, but I got as many books on it as I could,’ she recalls.

Kare found that pixels really weren’t that far removed from other forms of art — some of which dated back thousands of years:

‘I still joke that there’s nothing new under the sun, and bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple. I didn’t have any computer experience, but I had experience in graphic design.’

When she began, Macintosh had no icon editor — just a way to ‘turn pixels on and off.’ But Hertzfeld soon sat down and worked out an icon editor that automatically generated the hex under the icons so that Kare could focus on the less technical aspects of her design work.

Usually, says Kare, the team would tell her what concepts they needed, and she would try to come up with a selection of things that might work; she’d try them out, and the final design would evolve from there. Her early icons drew inspiration from a wide range of sources — art history, wacky gadgets, and forgotten hieroglyphics.”

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“The Internet Of Things Succeeds To The Extent That It Is Invisible”

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

When we’re truly wired, when the Internet of Things is the thing, when the revolution is not televised but quantified, and it’s all seamless so seamless, will we even know to smile? From a Foreign Affairs piece by Neil Gershenfeld and JP Vasseur:

The Internet of Things is not just science fiction; it has already arrived. Some of the things currently networked together send data over the public Internet, and some communicate over secure private networks, but all share common protocols that allow them to interoperate to help solve profound problems.

Take energy inefficiency. Buildings account for three-quarters of all electricity use in the United States, and of that, about one-third is wasted. Lights stay on when there is natural light available, and air is cooled even when the weather outside is more comfortable or a room is unoccupied. Sometimes fans move air in the wrong direction or heating and cooling systems are operated simultaneously. This enormous amount of waste persists because the behavior of thermostats and light bulbs are set when buildings are constructed; the wiring is fixed and the controllers are inaccessible. Only when the infrastructure itself becomes intelligent, with networked sensors and actuators, can the efficiency of a building be improved over the course of its lifetime.

Health care is another area of huge promise. The mismanagement of medication, for example, costs the health-care system billions of dollars per year. Shelves and pill bottles connected to the Internet can alert a forgetful patient when to take a pill, a pharmacist to make a refill, and a doctor when a dose is missed. Floors can call for help if a senior citizen has fallen, helping the elderly live independently. Wearable sensors could monitor one’s activity throughout the day and serve as personal coaches, improving health and saving costs.

Countless futuristic “smart houses” have yet to generate much interest in living in them. But the Internet of Things succeeds to the extent that it is invisible. A refrigerator could communicate with a grocery store to reorder food, with a bathroom scale to monitor a diet, with a power utility to lower electricity consumption during peak demand, and with its manufacturer when maintenance is needed. Switches and lights in a house could adapt to how spaces are used and to the time of day. Thermostats with access to calendars, beds, and cars could plan heating and cooling based on the location of the house’s occupants. Utilities today provide power and plumbing; these new services would provide safety, comfort, and convenience.

In cities, the Internet of Things will collect a wealth of new data. Understanding the flow of vehicles, utilities, and people is essential to maximizing the productivity of each, but traditionally, this has been measured poorly, if at all. If every street lamp, fire hydrant, bus, and crosswalk were connected to the Internet, then a city could generate real-time readouts of what’s working and what’s not. Rather than keeping this information internally, city hall could share open-source data sets with developers, as some cities are already doing.•

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1 Thing About Obamacare Reportage

April 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

  • Why do reporters keep asking Republican leaders for their alternative to the Affordable Care Act, as it were an opinion and not a law? After two national elections, passage in Washington (albeit partisan passage) and being upheld by a right-leaning Supreme Court, the legislation is still treated as something less than the law of the land. I suppose it’s liberal journalists trying to put the GOP on the spot because the party doesn’t have an alternative and doesn’t want one, really–it just wants the ACA to go away the way it wants legalized abortion to go away. But what’s the point? Even if Congress swings to the GOP in our gerrymandered country in the 2014 midterms, it won’t signal any chance at repeal with President Obama in the White House until the beginning of 2017. With tens of millions of people being insured by then through Obamacare, repeal is likely a moot point permanently.

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“The Important Thing To Remember Is That Putin Is Leading From A Position Of Weakness”

April 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In a New York Review of Books interview, George Soros elaborates on the desperation that is Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and his sabre-rattling on the world stage:

“George Soros:

The important thing to remember is that Putin is leading from a position of weakness. He was quite popular in Russia because he restored some order out of the chaos. The new order is not all that different from the old one, but the fact that it is open to the outside world is a definite improvement, an important element in its stability. But then the prearranged switch with Dmitry Medvedev from prime minister to president deeply upset the people. Putin felt existentially threatened by the protest movement. He became repressive at home and aggressive abroad.

That is when Russia started shipping armaments to the Assad regime in Syria on a massive scale and helped turn the tide against the rebels. The gamble paid off because of the preoccupation of the Western powers—the United States and the EU—with their internal problems. Barack Obama wanted to retaliate against Syria’s use of chemical weapons. He asked for congressional approval and was about to be rebuffed when Putin came to the rescue and persuaded Assad to voluntarily surrender his chemical weapons.

That was a resounding diplomatic victory for him. Yet the spontaneous uprising of the Ukrainian people must have taught Putin that his dream of reconstituting what is left of the Russian Empire is unattainable. He is now facing a choice between persevering or changing course and becoming more cooperative abroad and less repressive at home. His current course has already proved to be self-defeating, but he appears to be persevering.”

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“He Read Musty Tomes That Experts Considered Hopelessly Out Of Date”

April 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I’ve put up posts before about Immanuel Velikovsky, the Russian-born psychiatrist turned catastrophist crank who presented a radical alternative to accepted planetary history. He was friends with Albert Einstein and Freeman Dyson, and was always perturbed that they and others in the scientific community didn’t take his science fiction “Worlds in Collision” theory seriously. From “Visionary to the Fringe,” by Paula Findlen in the Nation:

Early in the project, Velikovsky’s research took an unexpected turn. Seeking to confirm the historical reality of Exodus, he read the modern translation of the Ipuwer Papyrus and began to consider the potential correlation between ancient Egyptian catastrophes and biblical plagues: What had caused them, and were they indicative of a common pattern across cultures? After consulting Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas, he explored the records of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations. Velikovsky’s quest led him from the textual and archaeological challenges of deep history to the empirical findings and theoretical underpinnings of astrophysics, geology and paleontology. There, too, he found his greatest inspiration in historical sources, namely the scientific literature of the late seventeenth through early twentieth centuries, which lay neglected and largely forgotten in the stacks of the Columbia University library. Science’s past inspired his new vision of the present.

Velikovsky later observed that he rarely met professors in the library, lamenting the narrowly defined limits of their erudition in comparison with the breadth of his own. He read musty tomes that experts considered hopelessly out of date, attempting to absorb something from every possible domain of knowledge. In defense of his methodology, Velikovsky declared himself a historian and not a scientist, while nevertheless proclaiming the revolutionary importance of his findings for science. Historical data became his tool for rethinking science, though since Velikovsky failed to meet the empirical standards of either subject or to demonstrate his competence in basic research skills to expert satisfaction, neither discipline embraced him. However, scholarly disapproval has never been a serious impediment to public acclaim (consider the case of Trofim Lysenko or Malcolm Gladwell). Indeed, it became the cornerstone of his reputation as an anti-establishment figure, a latter-day Giordano Bruno or Galileo willing to be condemned as an intellectual heretic for defying authorities in pursuit of truth.•

_______________________

Velikovsky appearing on a 1964 episode of Camera Three:

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“Mathematicians Have Spent Time Calculating How Long It Would Take A Monkey To Write A Copy Of Hamlet”

April 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Monkeys hitting random keys on typewriters (or tablets) would take eons to write Hamlet but not quite as long to write something better than Hamlet. It’s logical, even if it’s almost completely useless information. From Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“Mathematicians have spent time calculating how long it would take a monkey to write a copy of Hamlet (even if they perform better than the macaques in England, the answer is a really long time — orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed). But Borges’s Total Library idea suggests an important corollary to the Infinite Monkey Theorem: a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter would mostly likely write something superior to Shakespeare long before it produced a copy of Hamlet.

The logic is simple. The odds of a monkey writing an intelligible sentence are low, but the odds of one writing a sentence from Hamlet are astronomical because there are many possible intelligible sentences but a limited number of sentences in Hamlet. In the same way, there are a limited number of works by Shakespeare, but there are an almost infinite number of plays and books that are better than Shakespeare ranging from a copy of Hamlet with one small, superior tweak to yet-to-be-written sci-fi novels to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series.”

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“Even The Things About Gmail That Ticked Off Some People Presaged The Web To Come”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was an early adopter of Gmail in 2004, back when you still couldn’t create accounts at will but had to get a code sent to your cellphone to complete the sign-up process. I still remember the disquiet I felt the first time ads seemed to be targeting me based on keywords in my messages. A decade later, I’m pretty much sick of the service, “free” though it is. It’s such clutter now, with so many of my emails filtered into the wrong folders and numerous “great offers” sent to me that I don’t want. I need to switch to an email that’s stripped down and simplified.

From Harry McCracken’s new Time article, “How Gmail Happened“:

“The first true landmark service to emerge from Google since its search engine debuted in 1998, Gmail didn’t just blow away Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the dominant free webmail services of the day. With its vast storage, zippy interface, instant search and other advanced features, it may have been the first major cloud-based app that was capable of replacing conventional PC software, not just complementing it.

Even the things about Gmail that ticked off some people presaged the web to come: Its scanning of messages to find keywords that could be used for advertising purposes kicked off a conversation about online privacy that continues on to this day.

Within Google, Gmail was also regarded as a huge, improbable deal. It was in the works for nearly three years before it reached consumers; during that time, skeptical Googlers ripped into the concept on multiple grounds, from the technical to the philosophical. It’s not hard to envision an alternate universe in which the effort fell apart along the way, or at least resulted in something a whole lot less interesting.

‘It was a pretty big moment for the Internet,’ says Georges Harik, who was responsible for most of Google’s new products when Gmail was hatched. (The company called such efforts ‘Googlettes’ at the time.) ‘Taking something that hadn’t been worked on for years but was central, and fixing it.'”

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“The Landscape Remains Institutionalized”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Much of the Internet is littered with hollow click bait, so that makes Richard Deitsch’s “Media Circus” column at SI a welcome anomaly. It’s always overstuffed with ideas and all sorts of interesting and provocative views. In his latest column, Deitsch presents a panel on race in sports media. It doesn’t disappoint. Here’s Gregory Lee Jr. of the Florida Sun-Sentinel answering the question, “How much racism exists today in the sports media?”:

“Gregory Lee Jr.:

The landscape remains institutionalized. During my 20 years in the newspaper business, the path to landing a job is about who you know. Sports editors tend to hire people they are comfortable around, people who could have a beer with them. It still happens. How else would you explain that 90 percent of the sports sections are made up of white males? There are only four African American sports editors at large newspapers today. One day, while in the offices of the Boston Globe, I had a conversation about potential candidates with my boss Joe Sullivan. I rattled off names of people I thought would be good for our NBA opening. My boss did not really know the people I named, so I invited him to attend the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in Las Vegas in 2007 so he could meet people that otherwise he would not have had on his radar for openings. There he made many connections with people not only in the job fair; Joe went to sports-related workshops, receptions and parties to get to know the talented journalists that were in attendance. The Globe would eventually hire great people such as Marc Spears and Gary Washburn, and Joe has been to a few more NABJ Conventions to check out talent pool and connect with the membership.

The problem in the industry is we don’t have enough voices in the newsroom to shed light on the disparities there. There are not many people of color or women in editing positions who can influence decision-making. Joe and I were a great team because he knew I had access to a number of talented journalists of color due to my participation in NABJ and the Sports Journalism Institute, a program that helps minorities and women achieve careers in the industry. During my time at the Globe we brought in a number of talented people such as Jerome Solomon, Baxter Holmes, Julian Benbow and then Monique Walker (now Jones). But the key thing is editors should take personal responsibility in developing their own talent database and not rely on the company’s recruiter. As an editor, I am expected to know who are the talented sports journalists around the nation, regardless of color. I should not have editors continuing to call me to locate talented minority journalists. I am happy to be a resource and headhunter for my fellow editors, but it’s time for all of them to create their own pool of talent. If we do that, then our numbers will grow. An example of a double standard in sports media is that African American sports reporters are told the path to getting a column is to start from the bottom on the high school beat, work your way to a college beat and then cover a professional beat. A few years ago, a major newspaper gave a column to a white male who never had a major beat before. This person skipped over the entire process that African Americans were told they had to take. Let me tell you, that pissed off some of my friends in the business. Let’s be clear, there was no animosity towards the new columnist. The frustrations rests with the consistent double standards that still exist.”

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“Here An Avalanche Of News Is Shaped”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Alistair Cooke brought his Omnibus TV show into the New York Times newsroom in 1954 to see how men–and only men–published news in that era. Listen to those clunky typewriter keys tapping. The paper began to computerize two decades.later.

“The Strongest Case For Giving Alcohol To People With Chronic Alcohol Dependence Is Based On The Principle Of ‘Harm Reduction'”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Providing alcoholics with alcohol is counterintuitive to say the least, though some programs do just that. They aim to keep addicts from engaging in dangerous behavior to get their fix, but they also ensure that pretty much no one will ever completely kick the habit. From Anke Snoek at Practical Ethics:

“A Dutch program pays chronic alcoholics in beer for cleaning the streets and parks. A Canadian homeless shelter provides their alcohol clients with six ounces of white wine every 90 minutes. Giving alcohol to alcoholics, it seems counterproductive from a ‘just say no’ perspective, but I would like to argue that it makes sense on many levels.

The strongest case for giving alcohol to people with chronic alcohol dependence is based on the principle of ‘harm reduction.’ Canadian ‘wet-shelter’ programs have emerged for two main reasons. The first is that many homeless shelters are abstinence based which means inveterate drinks would continue to sleep rough, even in freezing winter months, resulting in tragic deaths. The second reason is that chronic inebriates often consume non-beverage alcohol like hand sanitizer, mouth wash and aftershave thereby exacerbating already severe health problems. A recent study by the Centre for Addictions Research found that a “managed alcohol program” approach reduced emergency hospital visits and arrests among participants at the Kwae Kii Win Centre Managed Alcohol Centre by 40-80%.”

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“It Now Has A Unit Devoted To Studying The Intersection Of Biology And Engineering”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Freeman Dyson has been writing for years about an indefinite point in the future when biotech enthusiasts will be, à la their Homebrew Computer Club ancestors, tinkering in their garages, not creating new gadgets but new life forms. DARPA is, unsurprisingly, beating the hobbyists to the punch, as it did with computers and the Internet. From Meghan Neal at Vice:

“Ye sci-fi writers hard up for new material should spend an hour or so perusing the Defense Department’s 2015 budget proposal, especially the section covering the far-out research projects underway at DARPA, where the agency’s mad scientists are working to develop brain-controlled drones, biowarfare, engineer new life forms, and possibly attempt immortality.

If last year was the year of battlefield robots, cyborg soldiers, and weaponized drones, it looks like the next couple years will see the Pentagon gearing up for a deep dive into biotech. DARPA announced today it now has a unit devoted to studying the intersection of biology and engineering, the Biological Technologies Office.

The agency is betting that the next generation of defense tech will be take a cue from natural life, and as such one of the major focuses of the new unit will be on synthetic biology. It’ll ramp up research into manufacturing biomaterials, turning living cells, proteins, and DNA into a sort of genetic factory.

The goal is to create man-made, living supermaterials, prorammed through DNA code, that can be used for next-gen mechanical and electrical products, self-repairing materials, renewable fuels, solar cells, and so on.”

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“When You Invent The Ship, You Also Invent The Shipwreck”

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

The opening of “Automated Ethics,” Tom Chatfield’s excellent new Aeon essay about humans outsourcing moral quandaries to machines, which create some new challenges while eliminating many old ones:

“For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological development is inextricable from the idea of the accident. As he put it, each accident is ‘an inverted miracle… When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.’ Accidents mark the spots where anticipation met reality and came off worse. Yet each is also a spark of secular revelation: an opportunity to exceed the past, to make tomorrow’s worst better than today’s, and on occasion to promise ‘never again.’

This, at least, is the plan. ‘Never again’ is a tricky promise to keep: in the long term, it’s not a question of if things go wrong, but when. The ethical concerns of innovation thus tend to focus on harm’s minimisation and mitigation, not the absence of harm altogether. A double-hulled steamship poses less risk per passenger mile than a medieval trading vessel; a well-run factory is safer than a sweatshop. Plane crashes might cause many fatalities, but refinements such as a checklist, computer and co-pilot insure against all but the wildest of unforeseen circumstances.

Similar refinements are the subject of one of the liveliest debates in practical ethics today: the case for self-driving cars. Modern motor vehicles are safer and more reliable than they have ever been – yet more than 1 million people are killed in car accidents around the world each year, and more than 50 million are injured. Why? Largely because one perilous element in the mechanics of driving remains unperfected by progress: the human being.

Enter the cutting edge of machine mitigation. Back in August 2012, Google announced that it had achieved 300,000 accident-free miles testing its self-driving cars. The technology remains some distance from the marketplace, but the statistical case for automated vehicles is compelling. Even when they’re not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.

What, though, about more local contexts? If your vehicle encounters a busload of schoolchildren skidding across the road, do you want to live in a world where it automatically swerves, at a speed you could never have managed, saving them but putting your life at risk?”

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“Technological Dislocation May Create Great Problems”

March 31, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Automation will create wealth and foster new industries yet unthought of, but how will that wealth spread and will enough new jobs be created to replace the disappeared ones? My answers are 1) I don’t know and 2) not likely. From “A Mighty Contest” in the Economist:

“Robot-makers see their wares as a way of creating employment, both by allowing companies to make existing products more efficiently and by enabling them to manufacture new things that could not be made in any other way, such as ever more precisely engineered electronics and cars, not to mention films like Gravity. Others fear that their net effect will be to destroy a lot of jobs, and indeed that they may already be doing so. Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford, has seen a big change of heart about such technological unemployment in his discipline recently. The received wisdom used to be that although new technologies put some workers out of jobs, the extra wealth they generated increased consumption and thus created jobs elsewhere. Now many economists are taking the short- to medium-term risk to jobs far more seriously, and some think the potential scale of change may be huge. Mr. Thrun draws a parallel with employment in agriculture, which accounted for almost all jobs in the pre-modern era but has since shrunk to just 2% of the workforce. The advent of robots will have a similar effect, he predicts, but over a much shorter period. Even so, he is sure that human ingenuity will generate new jobs, just as it created vast new industries to counteract the decline in agricultural employment.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both at MIT, also have high hopes for the long-term effect of robots and similar technologies. But in a recent book, The Second Machine Age, they argue that technological dislocation may create great problems for moderately skilled workers in the coming decades. They reckon that innovation has speeded up a lot in the past few years and will continue at this pace, for three reasons: the exponential growth in computing power; the progressive digitisation of things that people work with, from maps to legal texts to spreadsheets; and the opportunities for innovators to combine an ever-growing stock of things, ideas and processes into ever more new products and services.

Between them, these trends might continue to ‘hollow out’ labour markets in developed countries and, soon enough, developing ones, as more and more jobs requiring medium levels of skill are automated away.”

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“Bags Containing Mountain Air Were Shipped Into One Particularly Smog-Addled City”

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

Over the past few years, you’d sometimes hear free-market extremists laud China’s lack of regulatory policy allowing for unfettered expansion of the nation’s economy. But there are, of course, no free lunches–and no free air, in this case. According to a post at the WSJ blog by Te-Ping Chen, environmental damage in China has entered the sci-fi stage. The opening:

“Proving that China’s fight against pollution has moved decisively into the realm of parody, bags containing mountain air were shipped into one particularly smog-addled city over the weekend.

No, it wasn’t a scene from Spaceballs. According to the organizer, a Henan-based travel company, 20 bright blue bags of air were shipped to Zhengzhou, capital of central China’s Henan province, as a special treat for residents. The air originated from Laojun Mountain, some 120 miles away from the city, and was brought as part of a promotional gimmick to show oxygen-deprived city residents what they’re missing.

In its account of the event, the state-run China News Service said that some of the residents who lined up for the chance to inhale—they were limited to a few minutes each—tried to wring the bags in order to extract every bit of air possible.

‘I felt my baby move right when I breathed in,’ one pregnant woman who participated in the event told the agency. ‘I would love to walk in the mountain’s forests after my child is born,’ Sun added.”

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“Once I Sit Down To Write, Usually I No Longer Have Any Hesitations”

March 31, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In 1988, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez was about to publish Love in the Time of Cholera, he sat for an interview with Marlise Simons of the New York Times. An excerpt:

Question:

You have said that your stories often come from a single image that strikes you.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

Yes. In fact, I’m so fascinated by how to detect the birth of a story that I have a workshop at the cinema foundation called ‘How to Tell a Story.’ I bring together 10 students from different Latin American countries and we sit at a round table without interruption for four hours a day for six weeks and try to write a story from scratch. We start by going round and round. At first there are only differences. . . . The Venezuelan wants one thing, the Argentine another. Then suddenly an idea appears that grabs everyone and the story can be developed. We’ve done three so far. But, you know, we still don’t know how the idea is born. It always catches us by surprise.

In my case, it always begins with an image, not an idea or a concept. With Love in the Time of Cholera, the image was of two old people dancing on the deck of a boat, dancing a bolero. Once you have the image, then what happens? The image grows in my head until the whole story takes shape as it might in real life. The problem is that life isn’t the same as literature, so then I have to ask myself the big question: How do I adapt this, what is the most appropriate structure for this book? I have always aspired to finding the perfect structure. One perfect structure in literature is that of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Another is a short story, ‘Monkey’s Paw’ by an English writer, William Jacobs.

When I have the story and the structure completely worked out, I can start – but only on condition that I find the right name for each character. If I don’t have the name that exactly suits the character, it doesn’t come alive. I don’t see it.

Once I sit down to write, usually I no longer have any hesitations. I may take a few notes, a word or a phrase or something to help me the following morning, but I never work with a lot of notes. That’s what I learned when I was young. I know writers who have books full of notes and they wind up thinking about their notes and never write their books.

Question:

You’ve always said you still feel as much a journalist as a writer of fiction. Some writers think that in journalism the pleasure of discovery comes in the research, while in fiction the pleasure of discovery comes in the writing. Would you agree?

 Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

Certainly there are pleasures in both. To begin with, I consider journalism to be a literary genre. Intellectuals would not agree, but I believe it is. Without being fiction, it is a form, an instrument, for expressing reality.

The timing may be different but the experience is the same in literature and journalism. In fiction, if you feel you get a scoop, a scoop about life that fits into your writing, it’s the same emotion as a journalist when he gets to the heart of a story. Those moments occur when you least expect them and they bring extraordinary happiness. Just as a journalist knows when he’s got the story, a writer has a similar revelation. Of course, he still has to illustrate and enrich it, but he knows he’s got it. It’s almost an instinct. The journalist knows if he has news or not. The writer knows if it’s literature or not, if it’s poetry or not. After that, the writing is very much the same. Both use many of the same techniques. But your journalism is not exactly orthodox. Well, mine isn’t informative, so I can follow my own preferences and look for the same veins I look for in literature. But my misfortune is that people don’t believe my journalism. They think I make it all up. But I promise you, I invent nothing either in journalism or fiction. In fiction, you manipulate reality because that’s what fiction is for. In journalism, I can pick the subjects that suit my character because I no longer have the demands of a job.

Question:

Do you remember any of your journalistic pieces with special affection?

 Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

There was one little one called ‘The Cemetery of Lost Letters,’ from the time I was working at El Espectador. I was sitting on a tram in Bogota. And I saw a sign that said: ‘House of Lost Letters.’ I rang the bell. They told me that all the letters that could not be delivered – with wrong addresses, whatever – were sent to that house. There was an old man in it who dedicated his life entirely to finding their destination. Sometimes it took him days. If it couldn’t be found, the letter was burned but never opened. There was one addressed ‘To the woman who goes to the Church de Las Armas every Wednesday at 5 P.M.’ So the old man went there and found seven women and questioned each of them. When he had picked the right one, he needed a court order to open the letter to be sure. And he was right. I’ll never forget that story. Journalism and literature were almost joined. I have never been able to completely separate them.”

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