Excerpts

You are currently browsing the archive for the Excerpts category.

“They Needed Truth; He Was The Oracle”

February 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As Seth MacFarlane uses some of his Family Guy wealth to reboot Cosmos on Fox, Joel Achenbach of Smithsonian magazine looks back at the show’s original host, Carl Sagan, who was something of an ambassador to his own country in the 1970s, a populist professor coaxing Americans through the shock and awe of the post-Space Race with serious scholarship, talk-show schmoozing and provocation. An excerpt:

“The Sagan archive gives us a close-up of the celebrity scientist’s frenetic existence and, more important, a documentary record of how Americans thought about science in the second half of the 20th century. We hear the voices of ordinary people in the constant stream of mail coming to Sagan’s office at Cornell. They saw Sagan as the gatekeeper of scientific credibility. They shared their big ideas and fringe theories. They told him about their dreams. They begged him to listen. They needed truth; he was the oracle.

The Sagan files remind us how exploratory the 1960s and ’70s were, how defiant of official wisdom and mainstream authority, and Sagan was in the middle of the intellectual foment. He was a nuanced referee. He knew UFOs weren’t alien spaceships, for example, but he didn’t want to silence the people who believed they were, and so he helped organize a big UFO symposium in 1969, letting all sides have their say.

Space itself seemed different then. When Sagan came of age, all things concerning space had a tail wind: There was no boundary on our outer-space aspirations. Through telescopes, robotic probes and Apollo astronauts, the universe was revealing itself at an explosive, fireworks-finale pace.

Things haven’t quite worked out as expected. ‘Space Age’ is now an antiquated phrase. The United States can’t even launch astronauts at the moment. The universe continues to tantalize us, but the notion that we’re about to make contact with other civilizations seems increasingly like stoner talk.”

________________________

In 1988, Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Hawking on God and other aliens:

Tags: , ,

“It Could Just Be A Coincidence”

February 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

As baseball season gets closer, I think back on puzzling display copy for a New Yorker article from three seasons ago about Tampa Bay’s then-spare outfielder Sam Fuld. There wasn’t anything wrong with the actual piece by Ben McGrath–Fuld is an interesting topic as a brainy last guy on the bench who’s overcome diabetes–but the headline was destined to be very wrong the second it was published. It read “Super Sam: Early Success for a Late Bloomer.” Except there was little chance that the veteran, who enjoyed a great April, would overcome a poor hit tool, no power and a history of offensive deficiency to become a “late bloomer.” 

Fuld was just a subpar player who had a hot first month of the season, most likely because a lot of batted balls that were usually caught were finding holes. It was a statistical outlier, apt to happen from time to time, and just as likely to be corrected as more at-bats piled up. He ended that season with a .673 OPS (very substandard) and will have a tough time making the major-league squad in Oakland this spring. (Again: In all fairness to McGrath, he suggested that Fuld was just a shooting star. It’s more the hed and dek that were misleading.)

If this kind of statistical outlier happens during the middle of a season, it’s hardly noticed. But when it happens at the beginning of one, headline writers have a tendency to create a narrative that isn’t true. A player has magically improved! It will occur this season with some other player who, like Fuld, is fungible with guys in the minors.

But baseball and lesser sports don’t have ownership of such misreadings. It can also be the case with serious things like cancer clusters. We always want to investigate health crises that might have an unnatural origin, but we must remember that sometimes it’s just the numbers, merely an outlier.

From Amy Chozick’s New York Times Magazine interview with mathematician David J. Hand:

“Amy Chozick:

You also write that geographical clusters of people with diseases might not necessarily be a result of environmental issues.

David J. Hand:

 

It could just be a coincidence. Well, they could be due to some sort of pollution or infectious disease or something like that, but you can expect clusters to occur just by chance as well. So it’s an interesting statistical problem to tease these things out. Is this a genuine cluster in the sense that there’s a cause behind it? Or is it a chance cluster?

Amy Chozick:

So we shouldn’t dismiss those coincidences?

David J. Hand:

No, but if you do see such a cluster, then you should work out the chance that you would see such a cluster purely randomly, purely by chance, and if it’s very low odds, then you should investigate it carefully.”

Tags: , ,

“As Global Bee Colonies Are In Decline, This Design Contributes To The Preservation Of The Species”

February 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

The Urban beehive is a concept by Philips Design that would allow city dwellers to observe apiary behavior, collect honey, and, perhaps, witness Colony Collapse Disorder. From the company’s promotional materials:

“The design of the beehive is unconventional, appealing, and respects the natural behavior of the bees. It consists of two parts: entry passage and flower pot outside, and glass vessel containing an array of honeycomb frames, inside. The glass shell filters light to let through the orange wavelength which bees use for sight. The frames are provided with a honeycomb texture for bees to build their wax cells on. Smoke can be released into the hive to calm the bees before it is opened, in keeping with established practice.

This is a sustainable, environmentally friendly product concept that has direct educational effects. The city benefits from the pollination, and humans benefit from the honey and the therapeutic value of observing these fascinating creatures in action. As global bee colonies are in decline, this design contributes to the preservation of the species and encourages the return of the urban bee.”

______________________

“Hello Doug. Would you personally miss bees if they disappeared?”:

“The Idea Of Death Suggests There’s A Sharp Point Of No Return”

February 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

An especially good RadioLab podcast episode hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, about defying death, includes a brief interview with Harvard geneticist George Church, who thinks we can defeat the Reaper by identifying and controlling our atoms.

A repost of two earlier items about Church.

__________________________

From a really good Spiegel interview with synthetic biology pioneer George Church, a passage about cloning Neanderthals, which would allow us to finally end our shortage of stupid people:

“Spiegel:

Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by ‘soon’? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?

George Church:

That depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think so. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?

Spiegel:

Perhaps because it is banned?

George Church:

That may be true in Germany, but it’s not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way.

Spiegel:

Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do?

George Church:

Well, that’s another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what’s technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.”

__________________________

Imagine healthy, aging people experimenting with synthetic biology to prevent deterioration, replacing their own cells with inviolable, indefatigable ones. From a Technology Review Q&A conducted by David Ewing Duncan with geneticist George Church, whose new book is entitled Regenesis:

“Technology Review:

When is regeneration likely to happen in humans?

George Church:

There is much to be worked out. But here’s the leap. If you want to accelerate this, you have to pick an intermediate target that doesn’t sound so scary. So you’ll start out with bone marrow patients. And you’re going to basically make a synthetic version of that patient’s bone marrow using IPS, which is going to work much better than the diseased bone marrow. And once this works that’s going to catch on like wildfire. And then you’ll do skin, and then you’ll do every other stem cell you can get.

Technology Review:

Who is going to do this?

George Church:

The only way people are going to get this is through some brave soul. It will start with a sick person, and they will end up getting well, possibly more well than before they got sick. So you didn’t just correct the sickness, you actually did more. And they’ll give testimonials, and someone from the New York Times will interview them, and tell this appealing anecdote.

Technology Review:

Will people who are, say, aging but not yet sick ever be able to use this technology?

George Church:

I don’t consider this medicine, it’s preventive. I expect somebody who is truly brave, who has nothing wrong with them other than maybe the usual aging, saying: ‘I want a bone marrow transplant’, or intestinal, or whatever. And it will gain momentum from there.”•

Tags: , ,

“They’re Based On His Belief That Technology Progresses Exponentially”

February 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A passage from Carole Cadwalladr’s new Guardian profile of futurist and Google employee Ray Kurzweil, who is often, though not always, right when making his bold predictions about technology:

“Bill Gates calls him ‘the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.’ He’s received 19 honorary doctorates, and he’s been widely recognised as a genius. But he’s the sort of genius, it turns out, who’s not very good at boiling a kettle. He offers me a cup of coffee and when I accept he heads into the kitchen to make it, filling a kettle with water, putting a teaspoon of instant coffee into a cup, and then moments later, pouring the unboiled water on top of it. He stirs the undissolving lumps and I wonder whether to say anything but instead let him add almond milk – not eating diary is just one of his multiple dietary rules – and politely say thank you as he hands it to me. It is, by quite some way, the worst cup of coffee I have ever tasted.

But then, he has other things on his mind. The future, for starters. And what it will look like. He’s been making predictions about the future for years, ever since he realised that one of the key things about inventing successful new products was inventing them at the right moment, and ‘so, as an engineer, I collected a lot of data.’ In 1990, he predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. He predicted the explosion of the world wide web at a time it was only being used by a few academics and he predicted dozens and dozens of other things that have largely come true, or that will soon, such as that by the year 2000, robotic leg prostheses would allow paraplegics to walk (the US military is currently trialling an ‘Iron Man’ suit) and ‘cybernetic chauffeurs’ would be able to drive cars (which Google has more or less cracked).

His critics point out that not all his predictions have exactly panned out (no US company has reached a market capitalisation of more than $1 trillion; ‘bioengineered treatments’ have yet to cure cancer). But in any case, the predictions aren’t the meat of his work, just a byproduct. They’re based on his belief that technology progresses exponentially (as is also the case in Moore’s law, which sees computers’ performance doubling every two years). But then you just have to dig out an old mobile phone to understand that. The problem, he says, is that humans don’t think about the future that way. ‘Our intuition is linear.’

When Kurzweil first started talking about the ‘singularity,’ a conceit he borrowed from the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, he was dismissed as a fantasist. He has been saying for years that he believes that the Turing test – the moment at which a computer will exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human – will be passed in 2029. The difference is that when he began saying it, the fax machine hadn’t been invented. But now, well… it’s another story.”

Tags: , ,

“A Tale Of Such Stuff As Very Bad Dreams Are Made On”

February 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Sid Caesar, a gigantic comedy talent from TV’s 1950s, who invented not only his amazing self but also the template for the Carol Burnett Show and Saturday Night Live, is remembered in the most recent New York Times blog post by Dick Cavett, who takes a break from excoriating his bosses. Caesar, a complicated and troubled figure, spent all his talent and energy in one decade and never did anything close to that level again. He made nearly $4 million a year for most of that time, so he probably wasn’t hurting for money, though he was hurting. I don’t think you reach Caesar’s level of genius without natural gifts and without a difficult childhood. A rickety foundation allows for a lot of bounce in the legs but also inevitable falls.

Below is an excerpt from Cavett’s reminiscences and a short clip of the talk show host with the comic. Also very worthwhile is a tribute that Conan O’Brien (very influenced both verbally and physically by Caesar) did with one of the comedian’s Your Show of Shows writers, Mel Brooks. Watch here.

“It happens so often, the suffering from drug and alcohol addiction or other psychological problems of comic giants like Jonathan Winters, Peter Sellers, Peter Cook, Buster Keaton … the comedy list only begins there. And those other afflicted giants: Garland, Barrymore, Robards, Burton, Taylor, Tracy et al. And the great writers, like … sorry, my space is limited.

We tend to think that having a skyrocketing talent and being able to exercise it before an adoring public would guarantee a happy life. Silly old us.

Sid’s autobiography Where Have I Been? is a horror story. A tale of such stuff as very bad dreams are made on. Suffering an alcoholism that seemed to match in size his talent, he lost whole years of his life while living them.

A striking instance from that book sticks hard in my mind. In the midst of one of his darkest periods, Sid learned to his surprise that he had recently made a feature movie in Australia! His total memory of those months consisted of the boarding of a plane and a single sunset.

Someone years ago wrote, in a stately article in The Partisan Review, that there seemed to be in humankind what he called ‘the law of negative compensation.’ That the gifted must also be the punished.”

 

Tags: , , ,

“The Internet Is A Secret-Spilling Machine”

February 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t read Gawker much anymore even though the site has some very talented writers and editors. I don’t look down on it–just elsewhere. Gossip has value for a society; it just doesn’t interest me very much. Viral videos and stories aren’t what I find appealing. And posts that often seem to view the world as black or white, with no gray, aren’t convincing to me.

But that doesn’t mean I’m right. In all fairness, why would company founder Nick Denton want to attract my eyeballs? I’m not going to make him any money with my interests in obscure and offbeat stuff. Getting traffic makes money, so why trash someone who’s playing by the rules of engagement? Unless, of course, an organization is outright lying and manipulating like Fox News. But I don’t think Gawker does that. I think it’s looking for truth, even if it’s usually truth I don’t care about. 

From Denton’s new Playboy interview conducted by Jeff Bercovici:

“Playboy:

So Kinja is your bet that in 10 years we will all be part of a crowdsourced gossip press reporting on one another.

Nick Denton:

The Panopticon—the prison in which everybody is exposed to scrutiny all the time. Do you remember the website Fucked Company? It was big in about 2000, 2001. I was CEO of Moreover Technologies at the time. A saleswoman put in an anonymous report to the site about my having paid for the eye operation of a young male executive I had the hots for. The story, like many stories, was roughly half true. Yes, there was a young male executive. Yes, he did have an eye operation. No, it wasn’t paid for by me. It was paid for by the company’s health insurance according to normal procedure. And no, I didn’t fancy him; I detested him. It’s such a great example of Fucked Company and, by extension, most internet discussion systems. There’s some real truth that gets told that is never of a scale to warrant mainstream media attention, and there’s also no mechanism for fact-checking, no mechanism to actually converge on some real truth. It’s out there. Half of it’s right. Half of it’s wrong. You don’t know which half is which. What if we could develop a system for collaboratively reaching the truth? Sources and subjects and writers and editors and readers and casual armchair experts asking questions and answering them, with follow-ups and rebuttals. What if we could actually have a journalistic process that didn’t require paid journalists and tape recorders and the cost of a traditional journalistic operation? You could actually uncover everything—every abusive executive, every corrupt eye operation.

Playboy:

What are the implications for the broader society? What does America look like from inside the Panopticon?

Nick Denton:

When people take a look at the change in attitudes toward gay rights or gay marriage, they talk about the example of people who came out, celebrities who came out. That has a pretty powerful effect. But even more powerful are all the friends and relatives, people you know. When it’s no longer some weird group of faggots on Christopher Street but actually people you know, that’s when attitudes change, and my presumption is the internet is going to be a big part of that. You’re going to be bombarded with news you wouldn’t necessarily have consumed—information, humanity, texture. I think Facebook, more than anything else, and the internet have been responsible for a large part of the liberalization of the past five or 10 years when it comes to sex, when it comes to drinking. Five years ago it was embarrassing when somebody had photographs of somebody drunk as a student. There was actually a discussion about whether a whole generation of kids had damaged their career prospects because they put up too much information about themselves in social media. What actually happened was that institutions and organizations changed, and frankly any organization that didn’t change was going to handicap itself because everyone, every normal person, gets drunk in college. There are stupid pictures or sex pictures of pretty much everybody. And if those things are leaked or deliberately shared, I think the effect is to change the institutions rather than to damage the individuals. The internet is a secret-spilling machine, and the spilling of secrets has been very healthy for a lot of people’s lives.”

Tags: ,

“As The Years Go By, And The Ambitions Of The Space Age Fade, The Golden Record Takes On A Melancholy Power”

February 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross opines on the Voyager spacecraft which carried with it the Golden Record, a collection of sounds and sights from Earth sent as a message in a bottle to the cosmos in 1977. As Thomas Edison had “crossed” the Atlantic without leaving America in 1888, we were able to bounce around the stars in a similarly disembodied way. Since Beethoven and others have already rolled over, there remain only two living composers who contributed music to the recording: Laurie Spiegel and Chuck Berry. An excerpt from Ross about the former:

“Of the composers and songwriters represented on the Golden Record—Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and various others—Spiegel and Chuck Berry are the only ones still living. I couldn’t reach Mr. Berry, but Spiegel supplied a few thoughts about what it’s like to have a work of hers wending its way into deep space. “I often think of those craft as sad and lonely,” she told me, “so very far from home, moving ever farther into the cold and the dark, sensing more and more hungrily for the slight, fading, low-level warmth of the increasingly dim sun. Yes, it is an amazing accomplishment for us humans, but it can also generate a feeling that a small part of us, the accumulated living habitation of this planet, has been propelled farther away from its home than anything ever should be. The rational part of my mind knows that I shouldn’t anthropomorphize, and see the Voyager as a being in exile or even as an extension of our own organic sensory systems. Possibly, my doing so is a carryover reaction from my horror and sadness when I learned of the Soviet dog, Laika, who died on the Muttnik (Sputnik 2) space mission that launched when I was twelve. We know all too well what a double-edged sword our technological and information-structuring brilliance can be.’

Sagan, in his lifetime, was often mocked as a dreamer, a fantasist, a fount of grandiose pronouncements. ‘Billions and billions,’ Johnny Carson famously intoned. The Golden Record almost didn’t make it onto the Voyagers, as Timothy Ferris recounted in 2007; NASA feared that Congress would find the project ridiculous. As the years go by, and the ambitions of the Space Age fade, the Golden Record takes on a melancholy power. Sagan saw it as nothing less than a message in a bottle: ‘Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished—perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds—on the distant planet Earth.'”

_____________________________

“I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet”:

Tags: , ,

“Is It Necessary To Make Intelligent Systems Human-Like?”

February 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s clear by now that our natural tendency is to accept machines that can feign humanness, even when there’s no logical reason to do so. That makes it easier for us to transition to a digital world but often confuses the question of what is genuine AI, what is simulacra and what is somewhere in between. In a Wired piece, Vlad Sejnoha uses Spike Jonze’s Her to take a look at the future of computerized assistants. An excerpt:

“One of the most compelling aspects of Samantha is that she behaves in an utterly human-like manner, with a true sense of what is humorous and sad. This is yet a higher level of reasoning, and huge challenges remain to truly understand — and program — social relationships, emotional ties, and humor, which are all parts of everyday knowledge. It is more conceivable that we will be able to make a system understand why a person feels sad or happy (in the most primitive terms, perhaps because of realization of goal failure or goal success), than actually simulating or replicating visceral feelings in machines.

Is it necessary to make intelligent systems human-like?

Much of human behavior is motivated by emotions and not by black-and-white logical arguments (search through any popular online news blog for evidence!). The machine thus needs to understand to some degree why a human is doing something or wants something done, just as much as we demand an explanation from them about their own behavior. There is also a very practical reason to want this: in order to interact effectively we need a model of the ‘other,’ whether it’s an app or a person. At a high level of sophistication it will be faster and more efficient to allow us to start from such models we have of humans, as opposed to slowly discovering the parameters of a wholly alien and new ‘AI tool.’

There is also that astonishing voice… Samantha had us at that first playful and breathy ‘Hi.’

The amazing emotional range and subtle modulation of Samantha’s voice is beyond what today’s speech synthesis can produce, but this technology is on a trajectory to cross the ‘uncanny valley’ (the awkward zone of ‘close but not quite human’ performance) in the next few years. New speech generation models, driven in part by machine learning as well as by explicit knowledge of the meaning of the text, will be able to produce artificial voices with impressively natural characteristics and absence of artifacts.”

Tags: ,

“The Attitudes That Put Lion Cubs On Store Shelves Is Not Completely Gone”

February 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Private zoos have existed almost as long as abodes themselves (here and here) and Animal Planet and the like have only persuaded Americans to take on pets they’re unable to wrangle (scroll down to second entry). Of course, the trade in illegal animals and the staging of private hunts goes beyond national boundaries–it’s a global problem. The opening of “The Exotic Animal Trade” by Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“According to a popular story, when Ronald Reagan called the Animal Kingdom pet shop at Harrods, the luxury London department store, and asked if the store sold elephants, the agent on the line replied, ‘Would that be African or Indian, sir?’

As of this year, the world famous store closed the Animal Kingdom to make way for more racks of women’s apparel. A London tabloid dubbed its closing the end of ‘one of the most extraordinary eras in retail history.’ For decades, Animal Kingdom was a fantasy come to life. The above story appears to be a myth — Reagan actually received a baby elephant from Harrods as a gift from the exiled crown prince of Albania, who lived in California when Reagan was governor. But wealthy Harrods customers did buy lion cubs, rare birds, and even an alligator. The Daily Telegraph quoted a patron: ‘It’s a great shame, it’s a London institution and an amazing place to go.’

Animal rights groups cheered the news, although no more than the closing of any pet shop. (They prefer responsible breeders and rescue operations.) The Animal Kingdom lately featured mostly a pet spa and overpriced animal collars. Due to increased animal welfare concerns and legislation such as the Endangered Species Act (passed in 1976 in Britain), more commonplace dogs, cats, and hamsters long ago replaced lions and elephants on the store shelves.

Patrons and store representatives described Animal Kingdom as emblematic of a past that contrasts with today’s concern for animal welfare and appreciation of endangered species. Yet the attitudes that put lion cubs on store shelves is not completely gone. The most well known example for Americans is the former boxer Mike Tyson, whose ownership of 7 tigers inspired jokes in the movie The Hangover. Rather than being an outlier case of an eccentric celebrity, however, the purchase of exotic animals is a multi-billion dollar industry straddling the border between legal and illegal.”

Tags: ,

“We Can’t Live In A State Of Perpetual Doubt, So We Make Up The Best Story Possible And We Live As If The Story Were True”

February 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a New York Review of Books essay, Freeman Dyson writes with his typical grace about a new volume which argues that erroneous scientific theories are a natural and necessary thing. An excerpt:

“Brilliant Blunders, by Mario Livio, is a lively account of five wrong theories proposed by five great scientists during the last two centuries. These examples give for nonexpert readers a good picture of the way science works. The inventor of a brilliant idea cannot tell whether it is right or wrong. Livio quotes the psychologist Daniel Kahneman describing how theories are born: ‘We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.’ A theory that began as a wild guess ends as a firm belief. Humans need beliefs in order to live, and great scientists are no exception. Great scientists produce right theories and wrong theories, and believe in them with equal conviction.

The essential point of Livio’s book is to show the passionate pursuit of wrong theories as a part of the normal development of science. Science is not concerned only with things that we understand. The most exciting and creative parts of science are concerned with things that we are still struggling to understand. Wrong theories are not an impediment to the progress of science. They are a central part of the struggle.

The five chief characters in Livio’s drama are Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein. Each of them made major contributions to the understanding of nature, and each believed firmly in a theory that turned out to be wrong.”

Tags: , ,

“Artificial Intelligence Is Here Now”

February 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Tasks that both humans and automated machines both can do will be left completely to the latter soon enough. We just can’t compete. But I don’t think that means these robots are truly Artificial Intelligence. I agree with Douglas Hofstadter about that. Scientists Miles Brundage and Joanna Bryson completely disagree with this line of thinking, arguing that IBM’s Watson, the second most interesting Jeopardy! champ, is indeed true AI. The opening of their article at Slate on the topic:

“Artificial intelligence is here now. This doesn’t mean that Cylons disguised as humans have infiltrated our societies, or that the processors behind one of the search engines have become sentient and are now making their own plans for world domination. But denying the presence of AI in our society not only takes away from the achievements of science and commerce, but also runs the risk of complacency in a world where more and more of our actions and intentions are being analyzed and influenced by intelligent machines. Not everyone agrees with this way of looking at the issue, though.

Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, recently claimed that IBM’s Jeopardy! champion AI system Watson is not real artificial intelligence. Watson, he says, is ‘just a text search algorithm connected to a database, just like Google search. It doesn’t understand what it’s reading.’ This is wrong in at least two ways fundamental to what it means to be intelligent. First, although Watson includes many forms of text search, it is first and foremost a system capable of responding appropriately in real-time to new inputs. It competed against humans to ring the buzzer first, and Watson couldn’t ring the buzzer until it was confident it had constructed the right sentence. And, in fact, the humans quite often beat Watson to the buzzer even when Watson was on the right track. Watson works by choosing candidate responses, then devoting its processors to several of them at the same time, exploring archived material for further evidence of the quality of the answer. Candidates can be discarded and new ones selected. IBM is currently applying this general question-answering approach to real-world domains like health care and retail.

This is very much how primate brains (like ours) work.”

Tags: , ,

“The Watch Makes The Gun Think”

February 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Other countries have citizens with plenty of guns, but they tend to not fill their friends and neighbors with bullets constantly. In America, we haven’t figured out that trick. Until we get smarter about the psychological and cultural reasons for our shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality, perhaps smarter guns can help–firearms that resemble iPhones, in a sense. From Michael S. Rosenwald in the Washington Post:

“One of California’s largest firearm stores recently added a peculiar new gun to its shelves. It requires an accessory: a black waterproof watch.

The watch’s primary purpose is not to provide accurate time, though it does. The watch makes the gun think. Electronic chips inside the gun and the watch communicate with each other. If the watch is within close reach of the gun, a light on the grip turns green. Fire away. No watch means no green light. The gun becomes a paperweight.

A dream of gun-control advocates for decades, the Armatix iP1 is the country’s first smart gun. Its introduction is seen as a landmark in efforts to reduce gun violence, suicides and accidental shootings. Proponents compare smart guns to automobile air bags — a transformative add-on that gun owners will demand. But gun rights advocates are already balking, wondering what happens if the technology fails just as an intruder breaks in.”

Tags:

“His Ideals Were Lofty — The Results Are For Others To Judge”

February 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Harry Stack Sullivan.

Posting something about a survivor of the Rev. Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult reminded me of an odd obituary I came across a couple months ago. It was a 1991 New York Times postmortem about psychotherapist and commune leader Saul Newton, who was an avowed enemy of the traditional family, who wanted to break our accepted bonds–chains, as he saw them–smash them to bits. He thought he could create a new reality.

I vaguely recall speaking some years ago to an old NYU professor who was a believer of Newton’s and spoke glowingly of the late doctor. I was left chilled by the conversation. From the Times obit:

His beliefs had radical political themes. Earlier he was a union organizer, an avowed Communist and a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. In recent years, he was an ardent foe of nuclear arms and power.

‘Hated and Loved’

“He was both hated and loved,” said Esther Newton, his eldest daughter, who was not involved in his therapeutic community. ‘His ideals were lofty — the results are for others to judge,’ she said. “He was very bright and creative, charismatic and definitely difficult, handsome, attractive to women and tyrannical.”

At its peak in the 1970’s, his organization had hundreds of members living in three buildings on the Upper West Side. Its formal name was the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis; a subsidiary group was the Fourth Wall Repertory Company, a theater organization based in the East Village.

In recent years the Sullivanians declined in membership, beset by unfavorable publicity, investigations by state authorities into charges of professional misconduct by therapists, child custody lawsuits, the organized opposition of disaffected former members and estranged relatives of members, internal disputes and Mr. Newton’s deteriorating health.

The group’s name was derived from the late Henry Stack Sullivan, a prominent American psychiatrist. In 1957, Mr. Newton and Dr. Jane Pearce, his wife at the time, split off from the Sullivan-oriented William Alanson White Institute to form their own organization. Most mental health experts view the Newton group as having distorted Mr. Sullivan’s name and theories.

Through their unique brand of psychotherapy, Mr. Newton and his disciples controlled virtually all aspects of their followers lives, former residents said.

Members were taught that traditional family ties were at the root of mental illness and needed to be broken to foster individual growth, ex-members said. They were assigned to lived in group apartments and were expected to sleep with different sex partners, changing as often as each night. Married couples did not live together. Permission was required to give birth. Children were raised by babysitters, with parental visits allowed one hour a day and one evening a week. Members often broke off contact with their own parents and other relatives. Under outside criticism, some of these practices were moderated in recent years.•

Tags: , , , , ,

“We Were Good Law-Abiding, Brainwashed Followers”

February 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Rev. Jim Jones went off the deep end in 1978, taking with him some true believers who had initially followed willingly and others who had approached reluctantly. There were survivors, and their stories can be instructive in understanding group delusion. Deborah Layton, a Jones aide who survived the massacre, has just published a book on the topic. She did a very candid Ask Me Anything at Reddit in connection with the publication. A few exchanges follow.

_________________________

Question:

I hope this isn’t taken the wrong way, but I find the circumstances surrounding the Jonestown tragedy completely fascinating.

As someone who was in Jonestown, do you think that it was Jim Jones’ plan all along to commit this atrocity?

Deborah Layton:

It is not shameful to find the story so fascinating. Trust me, I continue to try to make sense of the losses.

When I had finished writing Seductive Poison I was asked by a BBC documentary film crew to accompany them back to Guyana and into Jonestown. I was hesitant until the producer came on the phone and told me in his research he had come across a woman’s dissertation about the history of Guyana that some 100 years ago a white minister convinced his Amerindian flock to kill themselves and come back as white men. I realized Jones must have known this story.

_________________________

Question:

What attracted you to that lifestyle? Were recreational drugs abundant in Jamestown?

Deborah Layton:

Innocence and naivete, the belief I was joining an organization much like the peace corp. I thought I could work hard for 2 years, help the poor and the needy, and continue on with my life.

There were no recreational drugs, ever, in Peoples Temple. We were good, law-abiding, brainwashed followers — unbeknownst to all of us, only Jones was using medications.

_________________________

Question:

As far as you know, did Jim Jones tend to prey on specific demographics/people with specific (vulnerable) personality traits? I’m sure he had to have had a special kind of aggressive charm about him to recruit as many followers as he did, but how much would you credit the sheer size of Peoples Temple membership to his recruitment preferences?

Deborah Layton:

He went after well to do idealistic college students– through whom he could siphon money from their parents; he targeted poor, black seniors–then siphoned their SS checks. More joined because of the positive press he received. Most believed they were only pitching in to help an organization with good deeds. No one thought they would be forbidden from leaving. Some who left were found, brought back, then punished, one man was killed. Jones used his political clout to procure more politicians then used those associations to intimidate his parishioners.

Jones often met with new visitors, wooing them with the amount of attention he gave them, telling them how he needed their qualities in his organization, that together he and they could change the wrong in the world–racism, classism….

_________________________

Question:

Knowing what you know now, what would you say your very best life advice is?

Deborah Layton:

No one joins a cult. No one joins something they think will hurt or kill them. People join political movements, social organizations attend off-campus dinner socials believing they are mingling with like-minded people. It is often too late when one realizes they’ve been deceived.

Although my experience is extreme, I saw this tendency again when I worked on the trading floor of an investment banking firm — where invisible boundaries are crossed believing the end justifies the means. When you believe in something and think there will be a great payout, whether in spiritual points or money it is often hard to take a closer look and walk away from so much. At some point in all our lives we have been entrapped and did not know how to extricate ourselves. The less extreme and most common are abusive relationships.

_________________________

Question:

How do you feel about the fact that “drink the Kool-Aid” is such a popular phrase?

Deborah Layton:

It’s a complete misnomer, because in fact 140 babies, parents and senior citizens in Jonestown were coerced and murdered. Babies do no commit revolutionary suicide. Jones had it planned. We innocents had no idea.

_________________________

Question:

Was there a lot of sex abuse in the community? A lot of cults seem to have that.

Deborah Layton:

Peoples Temple was a celibate organization. Having said that, Jones did rape men and women against their will — for the purpose of breaking down their sense of self and soul.

_________________________

Question:

Are there any people or organizations which are currently active that you fear may go the way of Jonestown?

Deborah Layton:

Yes, some call themselves churches, however, if joining means turning your back on everything you’ve known — your family, friends who are not in the organization — you are in danger.

Question:

Any in particular?

Deborah Layton:

You know them.

Question:

Is it the church that’s involved in the study of scientists?•

Tags: ,

“The Transformation Came Too Late To Rescue Its Reputation For Technical Competence”

February 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The private sector is often as incompetent as the government was in its botched Healthcare.gov launch, despite what techies and extreme free-marketers might have you believe. Mistakes in privately held technology companies are common, launches and relaunches are disasters, sites (like Twitter) have trouble with stability for years. I think Clay Shirky gives this truth no mention in his new Foreign Affairs piece about the Affordable Care Act tech meltdown, but it contains a lot of important points about project management. The opening:

“Late last October, the management expert Jeffrey Zients was given a mandate to fix HealthCare.gov, the website at the forefront of U.S. President Barack Obama’s health-care reform, after its disastrous launch. Refusing to engage in happy talk about how well things were going or how soon everything would be fixed, Zients established performance metrics for the site’s responsiveness, insisted on improvements to the underlying hardware, postponed work on nonessential features, demanded rapid reporting of significant problems, and took management oversight away from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services) and gave it instead to a single contractor reporting to him. The result was a newly productive work environment that helped the website progress from grave dysfunction in early October to passable effectiveness two months later.

Zients’ efforts demonstrated the government’s ability to tackle complex technological challenges and handle them both quickly and effectively. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the transformation came too late to rescue its reputation for technical competence. Given that the people who hired Zients clearly understood what kind of management was required to create a working online insurance marketplace, why did they wait to put in place that sort of management until the project had become an object of public ridicule? And more important, is there any way to prevent other such debacles in the future? The answers to both questions lie in the generally tortured way that the government plans and oversees technology.”

Tags: , ,

“So What Is Football? Is It Dogfighting Or Is It Stock-Car Racing?”

February 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Linking yesterday to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Coolhunt” piece made me think about his 2009 New Yorker article “Offensive Play,” which was bold for connecting the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal to NFL play and spectatorship. Because of the work of the Sports Legacy Institute and Dr. Bennet Omalu and Ann McKee, among others, there had been some media noise about the game and brain damage, but I don’t recall any mainstream attention on such a meaningful level until Gladwell’s inconvenient truth. And since then there’s been an avalanche of it. Sure, there are some key differences between dogfighting and American football (e.g., lack of free will vs. free will), but there are many uncomfortable similarities. I think it’s one of his best-ever pieces for the publication. An excerpt:

“At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?”

Tags:

“He Was Incredibly Lucky To Start Where He Did And End Up Where He Is Now”

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

Am I misreading the tea leaves? It seems like a lot of well-to-do New Yorkers are ready to pounce on the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, for any mistakes he makes while becoming acclimated to the job. Could it be that these are faux liberals who are secretly resentful about perhaps paying higher taxes? Maybe not. Time will tell. 

From “What Lottery Winners and Tom Perkins Have in Common,” Charles Kenny’s new Businessweek piece about the thought process of a man who is awful even by the non-rigorous standards of the venture-capital world:

“Perkins had the chance to be a successful executive in the first place because he was born privileged enough to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate in 1953, when a little more than 5 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 had a bachelor’s degree. If he had been born in Liberia, perhaps to a single mother, all bets of billionaire status would be completely off. He surely worked hard, and took risks informed by smarts and insight, but he was incredibly lucky to start where he did and end up where he is now, with enough money for a classic car collection and a massive yacht.

Yet Perkins is far from alone in thinking he’s rich because he earned it and the poor are poor because they didn’t. Indeed, the view seems to be an almost unavoidable side effect of becoming wealthy. A study by British economists Nattavudh Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald released last week looked at lottery winners involved in a general survey of attitudes in the U.K. Comparing views before and after lottery wins, the economists looked at winners’ political allegiances and views toward income distribution. Those surveyed were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement ‘ordinary people get a fair share of the nation’s wealth,’ and if they supported the (more right-wing) Conservative Party or the (left-leaning) Labour Party.

A win of just £500 (about $840) made survey respondents 5 percent more likely to change their vote to Conservative from Labour and significantly more likely to think that the current distribution of income was fair. The larger the lottery win, the bigger the impact on the respondents’ beliefs—even though their income rankings rose purely by chance. Considering that Perkins’s earnings from betting on tech startups are more than 1 million times the £500 that Powdthavee and Oswald found sufficient to shift attitudes, and since he did far more to earn his wealth than the lottery winners did, his views on redistribution aren’t surprising.”

Tags: , , , ,

“Robots And Animals Could Be Merged Into A ‘Biohybrid’ Society”

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

Emily Anthes, author of Frankenstein’s Cat, has written a Nautilus article about the integration of AI into nature, an attempt to erase the lines that separate, to bend the natural world according to our will. The opening:

“Several years ago, a group of American cockroaches discovered four strangers in their midst. A brief investigation revealed that the interlopers smelled like cockroaches, and so they were welcomed into the cockroach community. The newcomers weren’t content to just sit on the sidelines, however. Instead, they began to actively shape the group’s behavior. Nocturnal creatures, cockroaches normally avoid light. But when the intruders headed for a brighter shelter, the rest of the roaches followed.

What the cockroaches didn’t seem to realize was that their new, light-loving leaders weren’t fellow insects at all. They were tiny mobile robots, doused in cockroach pheromones and programmed to trick the living critters into following their lead. The demonstration, dubbed the LEURRE project and conducted by a team of European researchers, validated a radical idea—that robots and animals could be merged into a ‘biohybrid’ society, with biological and technological organisms forming a cohesive unit.

A handful of scientists have now built robots that can socially integrate into animal communities. Their goal is to create machines that not only infiltrate animal groups but also influence them, changing how fish swim, birds fly, and bees care for their young. If the research reaches the real world, we may one day use robots to manage livestock, control pests, and protect and preserve wildlife. So, dear furry and feathered friends, creepy and crawly creatures of the world: Prepare for a robo-takeover.”

 

Tags:

“[They] Underscore The Company’s Deep Desire To Move Away From iPhones And iPads And Take Big Risks”

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

In a post-Jobs world, Apple has offered new iterations of the old but delivered no new great product. Perhaps entry into the auto and medical sectors will change that? Given the company’s history, the latter feels far afield. From Thomas Lee and David R. Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle:

“A source tells The Chronicle that Perica met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Cupertino last spring around the same time analysts suggested Apple acquire the electric car giant.

A spokeswoman for Tesla declined to comment. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

The newspaper has also learned that Apple is heavily exploring medical devices, specifically sensor technology that can help predict heart attacks. Led by Tomlinson Holman, a renowned audio engineer who invented THX and 10.2 surround sound, Apple is exploring ways to predict heart attacks by studying the sound blood makes at it flows through arteries.

Taken together, Apple’s potential forays into automobiles and medical devices, two industries worlds away from consumer electronics, underscore the company’s deep desire to move away from iPhones and iPads and take big risks.”

 

Tags: , ,

“Now Human Designers Are Getting Interested In Emergence”

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

War is an exchange of information with terrible human consequences. Perhaps eventually any loss of life will be unacceptable, and it will just be our robots versus your robots. But until then greater information may lead to greater casualties.

Some scientists are now looking to emulate termite “architecture” in robots, which may ultimately lead to automated navies. It’s not termite art but termite war. An excerpt from the Economist:

“Individual termites are, of course, far too dim to understand such things as convection and solar flux. Instead, a few simple rules encoded in their nervous systems by evolution and regulated by signalling chemicals called pheromones steer them to produce their mounds in all their architectural glory. This kind of behaviour, in which simple actions combine to produce sophisticated results, is called emergence.

Now human designers are getting interested in emergence, too. In a paper just published in Science, a group at Harvard, led by Justin Werfel, describes termite-inspired robots that can build things by combining magnetic bricks of a standard size. All their human controller has to do is program them with a few appropriate rules and leave them to get on with it.

Robot construction teams are not, in themselves, new. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have already demonstrated a system which uses remotely controlled flying robots to build things. What makes Dr Werfel’s approach different is that instead of having a controlling force, in the form of a computer program, sitting at the centre telling everything else what to do (as was the case in Pennsylvania), control is distributed throughout the system’s components, which cannot communicate with each other. The robots, which are little wheeled contraptions, do not need to see the bigger picture.

In the case of termites, the bigger picture is provided by natural selection, which has, over the millennia, refined the rules that individual termites obey. In the case of Dr Werfel’s robots, a human designer specifies the desired outcome and, with the help of a program developed by the team, generates the rules that will lead to its construction, with which each robot is then programmed. All that remains is to place a foundation brick to show the robots where to start building.”

Tags:

“The Company Now Looks To Consumer Happiness As A Starting Point Of Product Development”

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

If she’s not exactly hunting for cool, Intel’s Dr. Genevieve Bell is certainly pursuing happiness. The anthropologist leads a team of thinkers and futurists who scour the Earth to figure out what you want from personal technology, even before you can name it. They want to know what’s on your mind. They want to make you happy. From a profile of Dr. Bell by Natasha Singer in the New York Times:

“‘My mandate at Intel has always been to bring the stories of everyone outside the building inside the building — and make them count,’ says Dr. Bell, who considers herself among the outsiders. ‘You have to understand people to build the next generation of technology.’

By ‘outside,’ she isn’t referring only to consumers outside of the United States. Dr. Bell and her team are responsible for sussing out the attributes that people everywhere love, or wish they could have, in their PCs, televisions and so on. Over the last few years, they have been concentrating on consumers’ appetites for hyper-personal technology, like voice-recognition systems and fitness trackers. In essence, they are pushing Intel toward a more people-centric era of personal computing.

Lately, that work has become all the more important to the company. That is because Intel, which has long dominated the laptop processor field, was surprisingly slow to acknowledge the burgeoning market for smartphone chips. In fact, Dr. Bell and her team, among others, had forecast the mobile trend early on, says Diane M. Bryant, the general manager of Intel’s data center group, but Intel didn’t prioritize it at the time. Although the company recently introduced new chips for mobile devices, PC makers are still Intel’s largest customer base, accounting for $33 billion of its $52.7 billion in revenue last year.

Now, attributable in part to the efforts of Dr. Bell and her team, Intel is trying to catch up, forging into realms like wearable gadgets that could showcase its new, lower-powered ultrasmall chips. Futurists on Dr. Bell’s team are also developing a customizable personal robot, about the size of a big teddy bear, based on the new mini-chips. Where even a decade ago Intel still focused largely on turning out increasingly efficient technology for its industrial customers, its executives say, the company now looks to consumer happiness as a starting point of product development.”

Tags: , ,

“It Is In Fact Technically Feasible To Produce 2,500 Nutritious Calories A Day For Everyone In The City”

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

Can New York survive–thrive, even–as a self-sufficient and green city-state, with all its food coming from farming towers and miniature greenhouses? It’s not something that’s ever going to completely happen, but knowing what is possible could lead us to healthier, more-sustainable choices. From an Aeon essay by Michael Sorkin of NYC (Steady) State, an organization that hopes to answer that question:

“New York is a city of foodies with a staggering profusion of cuisines, and it has bred an advanced discourse about nutrition, organisation, justice, technology, and culture. It abounds with community gardens, with increasingly large commercial farming, and other sites of production, from backyards to rooftops to the tofu-producing cellars of Chinatown, but also with a rich distributive infrastructure of food co‑ops, farmers’ markets, meals‑on‑wheels, soup kitchens, school cafeterias and restaurants. The question for us was: how can all of this be elaborated into more supple and comprehensive networks that take account of our transformed habits and desires? And, to what degree could this be scaled up to feed 8.5 million people?

We discovered that it is in fact technically feasible to produce 2,500 nutritious calories a day for everyone in the city. At one level, the required infrastructure is not entirely outlandish. It would depend on the widespread use of vertical farming, building over existing infrastructure – railways, highways, factories, etc – and the densification of some parts of the city currently built at suburban scale. The cost, however, would be prodigious and many of the implications highly vexed. For example, the energy required to light, heat, and build all of this is, we’ve calculated, approximately equivalent to the output of 25 nuclear power plants, an eventuality that is, to put it mildly, somewhat at odds with our larger intentions. Likewise, the necessarily industrialised character of such production would beg the question of resisting the tender mercies of agri-business and the huge variety of its downside effects.

But, by finding a series of ‘sweet spots’, or more nominally ‘practical’ scales for sustainable food production, we’ve sought to balance cost and benefit socially, environmentally, economically, and culturally. We’ve looked at window boxes; at using the subways for freight; at a scheme encompassing the territory with a 100-mile radius around the city; and at reusing the 19th-century Erie Canal for a statewide system. We’ve recaptured street space, designed skyscraper farms for plants and animals, and plotted how to integrate all this into the fabric of the existing city. And, we’ve sought to deepen the idea of the urban neighbourhood as the core unit of sustainable urban organisation.”

Tags:

“Since Emanuel Took Office, However, Things Have Polarized”

February 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Chicago, the major American metropolis with the most stubborn racial divides, has seen its tale of two cities be told with even greater emphasis since Rahm Emanuel became Mayor. From Edward Luce’s insightful Financial Times article about the former Obama chief of staff:

“Crudely measured, Chicago is roughly a third white, a third black and a third Hispanic. Most Chicagoans seem to accept it that way. ‘We are the most segregated city in America,’ goes the joke. ‘Ain’t it great?’ Since Emanuel took office, however, things have polarised. Most white Chicagoans support him – as do a majority of Hispanics, according to the polls. Most African-Americans no longer do. The corporate world within Chicago’s elevated rail ‘loop’ has rarely had it so good. The same goes for pockets inside its largely Hispanic West Side. But Chicago’s South Side, where a young Obama cut his teeth as a community organiser, continues to fester. A rash of school closures last year did little to help. ‘Black families who can leave Chicago are still leaving,’ says Cobb. They call it ‘degentrification.’

Emanuel’s often testy relations with Chicago’s black neighbourhoods could be pivotal to his re-election next year. The gulf between the two Chicagos is at least as big as that between the ‘two New Yorks’, which Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of the Big Apple, has promised to bridge. De Blasio comes from the Democratic party’s liberal (‘Sandinista’) wing and promised to make New York’s Upper East Side pay more to make life better for its underclasses. Emanuel is closer to Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio’s predecessor, who drew on his philanthropic networks to revitalise New York’s economic heart. Both are enthusiasts for non-union charter schools. De Blasio, on the other hand, is a champion of the unions.

Emanuel’s Chicago versus de Blasio’s New York may be the closest America has to an experiment in how to make its cities both liveable and competitive in the 21st century. ‘Look, we face international forces that are far bigger than us,’ Emanuel told me in an interview in Mexico City, which he was visiting to inaugurate a city-to-city partnership (almost a quarter of Chicagoans were born in Mexico). I had asked him whether he and de Blasio were rivals. ‘We both have a great amount of concentrated wealth and great poverty,’ he replied. ‘My challenge is to make it a still-great city for the middle-class families that are the bedrock of Chicago.’

Emanuel’s impact so far depends on whom you ask.”
__________________

“It’s supposed to be fun”:

Tags: , , ,

“Dozens Of Individuals Have Since Written To Pääbo Claiming To Be Full Neanderthals”

February 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The idiosyncratic geneticist Svante Pääbo, whose new book has just been published, has taught us much about our ancient roots, our ties to Neanderthals and Denisovans. From Robin McKie’s Guardian profile of Pääbo, a passage about the scientist’s research on the former:

“His results provided a shock for both researchers and the public. When he compared his newly created Neanderthal genome with those of modern humans, he found a small but significant overlap in many of them. About 2% of Neanderthal genes could be found in people of European, Asian and far eastern origin. People from Africa had no Neanderthal genes, however. ‘This was not a technical error of some sort,’ Pääbo insists. ‘Neanderthals had contributed DNA to people living today. It was amazingly cool. Neanderthals were not totally extinct.’

Most scientists, including Pääbo, now account for this result by arguing that modern humans – when they first emerged from Africa – encountered and mated with Neanderthals in the Middle East. Their offspring carried some Neanderthal genes and as modern humans swept through Asia and Europe they carried these genes with them.

neanderthalstampThe revelation that many humans possess Neanderthal genes fascinated the public. Dozens of individuals have since written to Pääbo claiming to be full Neanderthals. Intriguingly, nearly all of them have been men. The only women who wrote did so to say they thought their husbands were Neanderthals. ‘I think that says a lot about our image of Neanderthals,’ says Pääbo.

Just what that input of Neanderthal DNA has done for Homo sapiens’s evolution is less clear. Pääbo speculates that changes in sperm mobility and alterations in skin cell structure could be involved. In addition, US researchers have recently proposed that Neanderthals passed on gene variants that may have had a beneficial effects in the past but which have now left people prone to type 2 diabetes and Crohn’s disease. ‘This is work that is going to go on for years,’ he adds.”

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »