Excerpts

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“We Met On A Street And Got Into An Argument Where Foolishly, At My Young Age, I Challenged Him To A Debate”

January 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

From Scott Feinberg’s Hollywood Reporter Q&A with Ahmed Kathrada, Robben Island prisonmate of Nelson Mandela for 26 years and friend and fellow anti-Apartheid activist for decades longer:

“Question:

Wasn’t it when the Indian Congress and the African National Congress first started interacting that you first met Nelson Mandela?

Ahmed Kathrada:

Yes. I was already in the Indian Youth Congress at the time. I met him through his university colleagues, who were Indians whom I knew. He used to frequent their place and that is where I met him in 1946, 68 years ago.

Question:

What were your first impressions of him?

Ahmed Kathrada:

My abiding impression of him, which lasted all my life, was his ability to relate to me as an equal, so much so that the questions he asked me made me feel so comfortable that I could go back to school and boast to my friends that I met a university student who treated me the way he did. That is how I remembered him all my life. He had an ability to treat everybody as equals.

Question:

Is it true, though, that when you two first met, you initially sort of challenged him a little bit? You wanted to debate him, didn’t you?

Ahmed Kathrada:

Yes. That was the one and the only argument we had. I’m 11 years his junior and it was on a question of a strike that was jointly organized by the Indian Congress, the Communist Party and the ANC. He belonged to the ANC Youth League, and the Youth League was not racist but it was against cooperation with the Communist Party or with other liberation organizations. We met on a street and got into an argument where foolishly, at my young age, I challenged him to a debate, and that led to a little argument. But that was all history and we teased each other all the years on Robben Island because the strike which they opposed was successful, but unfortunately eighty people were killed in that strike. And, of course, that led to a closer relationship between Mr. Mandela, the ANC Youth League and the other organizations. That was the genesis, I would say, of the Youth League changing its views from non-cooperation with other organizations to one of cooperation.”

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“Fewer People Want To Actually Attend The Games”

January 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1979, J.G. Ballard believed the future was shifting from mobile to home-based, especially the way we entertain ourselves. That’s happened, largely. Going to the game is not so important now because there are so many ways for the game to come to us. From Kevin Clark and Jonathan Clegg in the WSJ: 

“The NFL enters the first round of playoff games this weekend with soaring television ratings, billions of dollars in network TV contracts in their pocket and a nation of football fans who can’t wait to hop on their couch and watch a weekend of games.

The league has never been a more popular viewing option. There’s just one problem: Fewer people want to actually attend the games.

In the latest evidence that the sports in-home viewing experience has possibly trumped the in-stadium one, ticket sales were slow for the first week of the National Football League’s marquee stretch of games.

Three teams hosting games this weekend asked the league for extensions to sell more tickets for the games to avoid a television blackout in local markets, which is imposed by NFL policy if a game isn’t sold out. The teams, the Green Bay Packers, Indianapolis Colts and Cincinnati Bengals, needed large corporate assistance to ensure the sellouts.”

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Walter Cronkite in 1967: “We could watch a football game.”

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“Who Knows What Form The End Of Humanity Will Take?”

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

The opening of “Is Life a Ponzi Scheme?” Mark Johnston’s Boston Review piece about how to learn to stop worrying and love–or at least stop fixating on–the bomb, or whatever else it is that wipes out humanity:

“Who knows what form the end of humanity will take? Will it come by extraterrestrial invasion, or by the erosion of the ozone layer, or by a large asteroid impacting the earth, or by mass starvation during a long nuclear winter, or by a bacterium running amok in the post-antibiotic age, or by a nomadic black hole sucking up everything in its path as it wanders toward us, or by a gamma ray burst from any one of the host of supernovas destined to occur within three thousand light years of the earth, or by the eruption of the massive volcano that now sits, waiting, under Yellowstone National Park? Or will it be as the apocalyptic literature of Judaism and Christianity describes it, with the last days consisting of the terrifying separation of the sheep from the goats? Even if humanity somehow avoids all this, and even if we escape the solar system before the inevitable heat death of the sun, eventually the universe will come to consist of a subatomic soup so thin that nothing recognizably human will be able to exist.

So we are doomed. There is no way around it. The hope is that doom is far enough away for humanity to flourish individually and collectively. The lights will eventually go out; the issue is just how brightly they will burn in the interim.

Here ignorance is not exactly bliss, but it is helpful.”

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“Rewatching The Show Today Is A Curious Experience”

January 5, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

Jerry Seinfeld, continuing his endless, ostentatious victory lap, hosts the ambulatory Internet talk show, Comedian in Cars Getting Coffee, which features caffeinated cut-ups in souped-up sedans. As much as I love comedy and generally enjoy the program, there’s something about it that bothers me. I mean, in addition to the fact that the guests are almost always white males. (Tina Fey, a guest this season, is rumored to have a vagina, but so far she’s only flashed us the tits.) No, what’s disquieting to me about the show is that I don’t like seeing comics when they’re not doing comedy. They’re often not very interesting. In Seinfeldian terms, there’s a reason why the comic book is called Superman and not Clark Kent. Stripped of their powers, these people are a lot like you and I, but even worse. When the show works on a higher level, however, as it does in the Michael Richards episode and the one with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, it’s special. 

Perhaps there’s another reason the program is such an odd thing: the wasteful, careless ethos of the Seinfeld sitcom feels strange in a time of so much financial struggle. From Oliver Burkeman at the Guardian:

“A competing theory for Seinfeld’s low profile since 1998 is that his comedy belongs squarely to the 90s – an era of economic plenty, before 9/11, before widespread anxiety about climate change, when the bottomless self-absorption of Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer felt excusable. Rewatching the show today is a curious experience. The haircuts are terrible, obviously. But the much-hyped focus on ‘nothing’ – on overblown conflicts with doormen, restaurateurs and so on – feels familiar: it’s central to many of the shows that count Seinfeld as a major influence, from Arrested Development to The Office to Curb Your Enthusiasm. (The latter’s success fuelled yet another theory about Seinfeld’s post-90s career: that Larry David had been the genius behind the sitcom all along.) What stands out, in those old Seinfelds, is the weird callousness: a total lack of concern with anyone other than the central foursome, unmatched even by Larry David’s character in Curb, or David Brent, or the South Park kids. When George’s fiancee dies, poisoned by the glue in the cheap wedding invitations he’d insisted on buying, his pure relief is certainly funny, and in keeping with the famous motto of the show’s writers: ‘No hugging, no learning.’ But it’s also more pathologically egocentric than anything you’d encounter, in a comedic context, on TV today.”

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“This Is Very Different From How We Used To Die In The United States”

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

There’s a price to pay for living longer: Diseases that never had time to grow within us in the past now reach “maturity.” In our favor, though, fewer people perish now due to the birth of twins. From “How We Used to Die,” a post at Priceonomics:

“They say that nothing is certain but death and taxes, but how we die is far from certain. What kills us these days? By a wide margin, cancer and heart disease. This is very different from how we used to die in the United States.

In a study by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers compared causes of death from the past hundred years. They found that, in 1900, while heart disease and cancer were still major killers, they were less lethal than a host of other ailments. Pneumonia/influenza, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections each claimed more lives per 100,000 people than did heart disease. On average, more people died by accident than by cancer.”

“Deep Learning Has Been Applied To Language Understanding, But The Results Are Feeble So Far”

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

I don’t anticipate human-level AI at any time in the near future if at all. Silicon does some things incredibly well and so does carbon, but they’re not necessarily the same things. Even when they both successfully tackle the same problem successfully, it’s executed differently. For instance: Machines haven’t started writing great film reviews but instead use algorithms that help people choose movies. It’s a different process–and a different experience. 

I would guess that if machines are to ever to truly understand in a human way, it will be because there’s been a synthesis of biology and technology and not because the latter has “learned” the ways of the former. In a New Yorker blog  item, NYU psychologist Gary Marcus offers a riposte to the recent New York Times article which strongly suggested we’re at the dawn of a new age of human-like smart machines. An excerpt:

“There have been real innovations, like driverless cars, that may soon become commercially available. Neuromorphic engineering and deep learning are genuinely exciting, but whether they will really produce human-level A.I. is unclear—especially, as I have written before, when it comes to challenging problems like understanding natural language.

The brainlike I.B.M. system that the Times mentioned on Sunday has never, to my knowledge, been applied to language, or any other complex form of learning. Deep learning has been applied to language understanding, but the results are feeble so far. Among publicly available systems, the best is probably a Stanford project, called Deeply Moving, that applies deep learning to the task of understanding movie reviews. The cool part is that you can try it for yourself, cutting and pasting text from a movie review and immediately seeing the program’s analysis; you even teach it to improve. The less cool thing is that the deep-learning system doesn’t really understand anything.

It can’t, say, paraphrase a review or mention something the reviewer liked, things you’d expect of an intelligent sixth-grader. About the only thing the system can do is so-called sentiment analysis, reducing a review to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgment. And even there it falls short; after typing in ‘better than Cats!’ (which the system correctly interpreted as positive), the first thing I tested was a Rotten Tomatoes excerpt of a review of the last movie I saw, American Hustle: ‘A sloppy, miscast, hammed up, overlong, overloud story that still sends you out of the theater on a cloud of rapture.’ The deep-learning system couldn’t tell me that the review was ironic, or that the reviewer thought the whole was more than the sum of the parts. It told me only, inaccurately, that the review was very negative. When I sent the demo to my collaborator, Ernest Davis, his luck was no better than mine. Ernie tried ‘This is not a book to be ignored’ and ‘No one interested in the subject can afford to ignore this book.’ The first came out as negative, the second neutral. If Deeply Moving is the best A.I. has to offer, true A.I.—of the sort that can read a newspaper as well as a human can—is a long way away.”

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“What Would You Say Are The Top 3 Most Important Battles In The Known History Of Man?”

January 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Colonel (Retired) Peter Mansoor, who served under Colonel David Petraeus during the surge in Iraq and has been an outspoken critic of Donald Rumsfeld, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Two exchanges below, one about history and one the future.

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Question:

What would you say are the top 3 most important battles in the known history of man?

Colonel Mansoor:

Tough question, since there are at least a dozen that significantly impacted the course of history. But here are three:

  • Salamis (480 BC) – The Athenian navy defeats the Persians at sea, turning back the Persian invasion of Western Europe. What would our world look like today without Greek civilization?
  • Saratoga (1777) – The American victory over the British brought France and Spain into the war against Britain, and globalized what had been a regional conflict. The world today would look a lot different had the British defeated the colonists.
  • Moscow (1941) – The Red Army turns back Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and turns WWII into a two front struggle in Europe that Germany had no hope of winning from that point onward. The world today would be a dark place indeed had the Wehrmacht succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union.

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Question:

What do you think the next big evolution in warfare will be (apart from drones)?

Colonel Mansoor:

Drones are actually part of an ongoing trend that will impact war dramatically in the future – robotics. We will witness that evolution on the ground as well as in the air. If you look at drones, as advanced as they might seem, we are actually at the point where nascent air forces were in 1916 during WWI. Aircraft were first used for reconnaissance, then someone figured out how to drop bombs from them, then fighter aircraft were developed to attain air superiority, then aircraft were used for transport and strategic bombing. The same evolution will occur with drones, and we are at the leading edge of that evolution.

Robotic ground vehicles will also be developed in the future, as well as exo-skeletal suits that will dramatically improve the capabilities of infantrymen. It sounds like sci-fi, but it will happen.•

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“As Morozov Watched The Cyber-Utopian Fad Grow, His Distrust Of It Began To Harden”

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

Critic Evgeny Morozov rightly thinks we should distrust brands like Google and Facebook, but we should probably also save some skepticism for his brand: the techno town crier, the self-styled cassandra, the one who sees the Google Glass as half empty. He makes his way in the world by telling us that if the sky isn’t falling then it’s at least not as high as we think. And when someone raises money and esteem from a consistent stance, we probably should question the rigidity of the pose. His articles range from the marvelous to the meh, though that isn’t surprising for a 29-year-old writing at a breakneck pace. I like him; I question him.

From a new profile of Morozov by Michael Meyer in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“As Morozov watched the cyber-utopian fad grow, his distrust of it began to harden into a cyber-pessimism that could at times be just as dogmatic. After leaving Transitions, Morozov eventually ended up as a fellow at OSF (a funder of Transitions), which brought him to New York in August 2008. The following year Morozov gave—wait for it—a TED talk in Oxford called, ‘How the Net Aids Dictatorships.’ This was sort of a coming-out party for Evgeny the skeptic, and an important step in turning that skepticism into a brand. It’s another video worth watching and quite a contrast to his enthusing about crowdsourcing just two years before. In the video, he stands in the middle of the stage wearing a wrinkled blue shirt open at the neck. There is a humble, self-effacing air about him, as if he barely expects to be listened to. His only gesture is to move his hands up and down, often in unison, as he emphasizes his points about how all the digital tools and ideas the audience is so excited about are enabling surveillance and targeting of dissidents by thugs and autocrats worldwide.

“Evgeny becomes attached to particular ideas that he believes, for the good of the thinking public, need to be debunked,” says OSF’s Benardo. He compares Morozov to social critics like Karl Kraus and Dwight MacDonald, professional buzzkills who “felt almost divinely anointed” in their efforts to tear down false hopes and received wisdom.”

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“We’re Bastards To The World And They’re Bastards To Us”

January 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ambitious or just myopic Attorney Generals or District Attorneys sometimes shine too bright a light on a scary but small faction of criminals, forcing the public attention in the wrong direction. Such was the case in California in 1966 when a shocking report of a crime made the Hell’s Angels public enemy no. 1. Hunter S. Thompson elucidated the disproportionate attention the motorcycle gang was receiving in an article that year in the Nation, before feeding the myth himself with a book about the unholy rollers. An excerpt:

“After two weeks of intensive dealings with the Hell’s Angels phenomenon, both in print and in person, I’m convinced the net result of the general howl and publicity has been to obscure and avoid the real issues by invoking a savage conspiracy of bogeymen and conning the public into thinking all will be ‘business as usual’ once this fearsome snake is scotched, as it surely will be by hard and ready minions of the Establishment.

Meanwhile, according to Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch’s own figures, California’s true crime picture makes the Hell’s Angels look like a gang of petty jack rollers. The police count 463 Hell’s Angels: 205 around L.A. and 233 in the San Francisco-Oakland area. I don’t know about L.A. but the real figures for the Bay Area are thirty or so in Oakland and exactly eleven–with one facing expulsion–in San Francisco. This disparity makes it hard to accept other police statistics. The dubious package also shows convictions on 1,023 misdemeanor counts and 151 felonies–primarily vehicle theft, burglary and assault. This is for all years and all alleged members.

California’s overall figures for 1963 list 1,116 homicides, 12,448 aggravated assaults, 6,257 sex offenses, and 24,532 burglaries. In 1962, the state listed 4,121 traffic deaths, up from 3,839 in 1961. Drug arrest figures for 1964 showed a 101 percent increase in juvenile marijuana arrests over 1963, and a recent back-page story in the San Francisco Examiner said, ‘The venereal disease rate among [the city’s] teen-agers from 15-19 has more than doubled in the past four years.’ Even allowing for the annual population jump, juvenile arrests in all categories are rising by 10 per cent or more each year.

Against this background, would it make any difference to the safety and peace of mind of the average Californian if every motorcycle outlaw in the state (all 901, according to the state) were garroted within twenty-four hours? This is not to say that a group like the Hell’s Angels has no meaning. The generally bizarre flavor of their offenses and their insistence on identifying themselves make good copy, but usually overwhelm–in print, at least–the unnerving truth that they represent, in colorful microcosm, what is quietly and anonymously growing all around us every day of the week.

‘We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us,’ one of the Oakland Angels told a Newsweek reporter. ‘When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible. We are complete social outcasts–outsiders against society.’

A lot of this is a pose, but anyone who believes that’s all it is has been on thin ice since the death of Jay Gatsby. The vast majority of motorcycle outlaws are uneducated, unskilled men between 20 and 30, and most have no credentials except a police record. So at the root of their sad stance is a lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made; their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ball game and they know it–and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.”

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A year later, Sonny Barger terrorizes Thompson:

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“The Data’s Just So Awesome. It’s An Economist’s Dream.”

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

It’s not surprise, I suppose, that top tech companies have economics departments of their own, hoping to carve behavioral patterns into data mountains. From a Bloomberg article by Aki Ito about Silicon Valley competing with academia, government and Wall Street for newly minted PhDs:

“It’s this real-world impact that drew economist Michael Bailey to Menlo Park, California-based Facebook in 2012. Managers across the social-networking company come to his team of data scientists with various problems, and Bailey’s group runs experiments to find solutions.

Their goal is to have the findings be used to make the social-networking site a better platform for both advertisers and the now more than 1 billion users worldwide, he said.

Bailey said he didn’t even consider a career outside academia until Facebook asked him to join full-time after a stint there as a research intern. Even then, he was unsure: the point of enduring five grueling years of graduate school was to become a professor. Only after he returned to Stanford to complete his dissertation did he realize life in Silicon Valley was the better choice for him.

‘The pace is just so much faster here and I’m much happier solving a lot of different problems than focusing on one problem for seven years,’ said Bailey, 30.

Besides, he says, ‘the data’s just so awesome. It’s an economist’s dream.’

The rise of the Internet company economist can be traced to Hal Varian, who started consulting with Google in 2002 as a UC Berkeley professor. He became the company’s chief economist in 2007 and has helped hone the design of the company’s search advertising auctions, central to the $50 billion business.

Other experts in microeconomics have since made similar moves. Preston McAfee joined Yahoo! Inc.’s research arm in 2007 and left for Google in 2012. Susan Athey, then a professor at Harvard and now at Stanford, started consulting for Microsoft in 2007. Patrick Bajari has led Amazon’s team of economists since 2010.”

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“He Reached Out And Took A Few Pills From The Candy Dish In The Middle Of the Coffee Table”

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

Drugs have always been for polite people, too, though the packaging is often nicer. Prescriptions written on clean, white sheets of paper dispense pain killers with alarming regularity now, but it’s always been one high or another. From “White-Collar Pill Party,” Bruce Jackson’s 1966 Atlantic article:

Think for a moment: how many people do you know who cannot stop stuffing themselves without an amphetamine and who cannot go to sleep without a barbiturate (over nine billion of those produced last year) or make it through a workday without a sequence of tranquilizers? And what about those six million alcoholics, who daily ingest quantities of what is, by sheer force of numbers, the most addicting drug in America?

The publicity goes to the junkies, lately to the college kids, but these account for only a small portion of the American drug problem. Far more worrisome are the millions of people who have become dependent on commercial drugs. The junkie knows he is hooked; the housewife on amphetamine and the businessman on meprobamate hardly ever realize what has gone wrong.

Sometimes the pill-takers meet other pill-takers, and an odd thing happens: instead of using the drug to cope with the world, they begin to use their time to take drugs. Taking drugs becomes something to do. When this stage is reached, the drug-taking pattern broadens: the user takes a wider variety of drugs with increasing frequency. For want of a better term, one might call it the white collar drug scene.

I first learned about it during a party in Chicago last winter, and the best way to introduce you will be to tell you something about that evening, the people I met, what I think was happening.

There were about a dozen people in the room, and over the noise from the record player scraps of conversation came through:

“Now the Desbutal, if you take it with this stuff, has a peculiar effect, contraindication, at least it did for me. You let me know if you … “

“I don’t have one legitimate prescription, Harry, not one! Can you imagine that?” “I’ll get you some tomorrow, dear.”

“… and this pharmacist on Fifth will sell you all the leapers [amphetamines] you can carry—just like that. Right off the street. I don’t think he’d know a prescription if it bit him.” “As long as he can read the labels, what the hell.”

“You know, a funny thing happened to me. I got this green and yellow capsule, and I looked it up in the Book, and it wasn’t anything I’d been using, and I thought, great! It’s not something I’ve built a tolerance to. And I took it. A couple of them. And you know what happened? Nothing! That’s what happened, not a goddamned thing.”

The Book—the Physicians’ Desk Reference, which lists the composition and effects of almost all commercial pharmaceuticals produced in this country—passes back and forth, and two or three people at a time look up the contents and possible values of a drug one of them has just discovered or heard about or acquired or taken. The Book is the pillhead’s Yellow Pages: you look up the effect you want (“Sympathomimetics” or “Cerebral Stimulants,” for example), and it tells you the magic columns. The pillheads swap stories of kicks and sound like professional chemists discussing recent developments; others listen, then examine the PDR to see if the drug discussed really could do that.

Eddie, the host, a painter who has received some recognition, had been awake three or four days, he was not exactly sure. He consumes between 150 and 200 milligrams of amphetamine a day, needs a large part of that to stay awake, even when he has slipped a night’s sleep in somewhere. The dose would cause most people some difficulty; the familiar diet pill, a capsule of Dexamyl or Eskatrol, which makes the new user edgy and overenergetic and slightly insomniac the first few days, contains only 10 or 15 milligrams of amphetamine. But amphetamine is one of the few central nervous system stimulants to which one can develop a tolerance, and over the months and years Ed and his friends have built up massive tolerances and dependencies. “Leapers aren’t so hard to give up,” he told me. “I mean, I sleep almost constantly when I’m off, but you get over that. But everything is so damned boring without the pills.”

I asked him if he knew many amphetamine users who have given up the pills.

“For good?”

I nodded.

“I haven’t known anybody that’s given it up for good.” He reached out and took a few pills from the candy dish in the middle of the coffee table, then washed them down with some Coke.•

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“Obamacare Is Awful…Obamacare Is A Godsend”

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

Obamacare is far from perfect, but for tens of millions of Americans it’s the difference between life and death. I can’t believe how often that point gets lost in the discussion. As if we aren’t all unique people who mean something special to those close to us. People with health insurance don’t face death panels, but people without it potentially face them every day.

I think there are a few economists who read the blog, and it would be appreciated if you could refer me to any studies of what tens of millions of newly insured people will mean to the economy. I would think it would be a boon, but I’d like to read what non-demagogue professionals have to say.

From a new Michael Moore op-ed in the New York Times that looks at both sides of the Affordable Care Act:

“TODAY marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.

That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of blaming companies like Novartis, which charges leukemia patients $90,000 annually for the drug Gleevec, or health insurance chief executives like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group, who made nearly $102 million in 2009, for the sky-high price of American health care, the president’s Democratic supporters bought into the myth that it was all those people going to get free colonoscopies and chemotherapy for the fun of it. …

And yet — I would be remiss if I didn’t say this — Obamacare is a godsend. My friend Donna Smith, who was forced to move into her daughter’s spare room at age 52 because health problems bankrupted her and her husband, Larry, now has cancer again. As she undergoes treatment, at least she won’t be in terror of losing coverage and becoming uninsurable. Under Obamacare, her premium has been cut in half, to $456 per month.

Let’s not take a victory lap yet, but build on what there is to get what we deserve: universal quality health care.”

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“Some Back Tracking Was Needed To See How The Story Leaked”

December 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out his first coded sentence: “What hath God wrought!” And in the 170 years since then, the tools that have been wrought have been increasingly wonderful and terrifying. You really can’t legislate the more ill effects away, but the bright side is that they are double-edged swords, and those who misuse them are also prone to them.

On the topic of tools run amok: A passage from a Cleveland Plain Dealer article by Paul Hoynes explaining how the Indians signing of outfielder David Murphy, meant to be kept a secret for a while, spread accidentally at first and then virally:

“The Indians signing of free agent outfielder David Murphy to a two-year $12 million deal didn’t belong in the same airspace, let along the flight path, of Seattle’s deal with Cano. Still, it will go down as the most intriguing of the winter because the story was first reported by Murphy’s five-year-old daughter, Faith, at her Dallas-area preschool.

The deal wasn’t officially announced until Nov. 25 even though it hit Twitter on Nov. 19. The trigger to the story – a lesson on the meaning of Thanksgiving at Faith’s preschool.

‘She was in preschool and they were learning about Pilgrims and Indians,’ Murphy told reporters on the day his deal became official. ‘She spoke up that her dad was going to the Indians. Obviously, the word spreads quickly because of social media. It’s not the best situation, but it’s a good story to tell her when she gets older.’

There are no more scoops in the news business — at least not in the traditional sense. Breaking news hits the Internet in a matter of seconds. No one knows that better than a general manager of a big league baseball team, but even Chris Antonetti was taken back by a text he received from a reporter concerning Murphy.

‘Initially, I didn’t know how it broke,’ said Antonetti, entering his fourth year as Indians general manager. ‘Then I got a text from a writer and it said, ‘There is a kindergarten teacher in Texas Tweeting that David Murphy is going to be an Indian. I said, OK.’

Some back tracking was needed to see how the story leaked.”

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“It Could Be Said That Historical Fiction, Like Science Fiction, Is Really Always About The Present”

December 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

I’ve never understood why Luc Sante isn’t a staff writer at the New Yorker. What could make more sense? It seems an oversight. Here’s a poignant segment from his New York Review of Books piece about the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis:

“Then again, it could be said that historical fiction, like science fiction, is really always about the present. Llewyn Davis is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961. He has none of the communitarian goodwill, the erudite passion, or the optimistic idealism that marked the period. He is a confused, irascible striver who isn’t sure what he is striving for, apparently seeking a career when folk music was about the last place you’d look for one. It is suggested that he has been flopping on friends’ floors for months, when, at the time, people generally only did that when they first hit town, since it wasn’t hard to scratch up the twenty or thirty bucks a month it took to rent a tenement flat fifty years ago.

But if you excise the period details, he makes sense. Whereas in a better time he would spend five or ten years woodshedding and developing a soul, he has no choice but to enter some kind of race right away or die on the vine. He is consistently crass because he feels threatened by people and ideas he can’t dominate—and he can’t dominate very much because he feels threatened. (How else to explain his heckling an Appalachian singer, complete with autoharp and authentically awkward?) Somehow he has made a connection to something that is genuine and profound—the haunting music—but circumstances force him to treat it as a card to play rather than as a path to explore. The implacable dictates of a society in which the value of everything is determined solely by its sale price will sooner or later shuttle him into some low-level desk job. He’ll take his guitar out on weekends for a while, but then the regret will become too strong and he’ll bury it in the back of his closet. And when he sees this movie, he’ll feel a pang—and then he’ll laugh about the vanity of youth.”

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“We Also Have New Tools That Allow Us To Actually Reprogram Our Biology”

December 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ray Kurzweil’s prognostications always seem too optimistic and aggressive to me. It’s not that I don’t think we’ll accomplish most of what he says we will–if we don’t destroy ourselves first, that is–but I think it will take longer, in some cases much longer. The opening of his CNN piece which predicts the short term future of science and technological development:

“By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.

Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.

All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s.

We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to.

We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers.

RNA interference, for example, can turn genes off that promote disease and aging. New forms of gene therapy, especially in vitro models that do not trigger the immune system, have the ability to add new genes.

Stem cell therapies, including the recently developed method to create ‘induced pluripotent cells’ (IPCs) by adding four genes to your own skin cells to create the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell but without use of an embryo, are being developed to rejuvenate organs and even grow then from scratch.

There are now hundreds of drugs and processes in the pipeline using these methods to modify the course of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and aging processes.

As one of many examples, we can now fix a broken heart — not (yet) from romance — but from a heart attack, by rejuvenating the heart with reprogrammed stem cells.

Health and medicine is now an information technology and is therefore subject to what I call the ‘law of accelerating returns,’ which is a doubling of capability (for the same cost) about each year that applies to any information technology.

As a result, technologies to reprogram the ‘software’ that underlie human biology are already a thousand times more powerful than they were when the genome project was completed in 2003, and will again be a thousand times more powerful than they are today in a decade, and a million times more powerful in two decades.”

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“The More We Give Over Of Ourselves To These Devices, The Less Of Our Own Minds It Appears We Exercise”

December 31, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Whenever someone frets about us using computers to augment memory, I think back to Socrates agonizing over the effect of the written word on the same. I think the gain is far greater than the loss. Chris Ware, that brilliant fellow, isn’t so sure, at least when it comes to capturing special moments on smartphones. An excerpt from an essay he wrote to explain his newest New Yorker cover:

“Steve Jobs, along with whatever else we’re crediting to him, should be granted the patent on converting the universal human gesture for trying to remember something from looking above one’s head to fumbling in one’s pants pocket. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that most pre-industrial composers could creditably reproduce an entire symphony after hearing it only once, not because they were autistic but simply because they had to. We’ve all heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos hundreds of times more than Bach ever did, and where our ancestors might have had only one or two images by which to remember their consumptive forebears, we have hours of footage of ours circling the luxury-cruise midnight buffet tables.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed with horror that the memories I have of things like my daughter’s birthday parties or the trips we’ve taken together are actually memories of the photographs I took, not of the events themselves, and together, the two somehow become ever more worn and overwrought, like lines gone over too many times in a drawing. The more we give over of ourselves to these devices, the less of our own minds it appears we exercise, and worse, perhaps even concomitantly, the more we coddle and covet the devices themselves. The gestures necessary to operate our new touch-sensitive generation of technology are disturbingly similar to caresses.”

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“I Think There Is Little Doubt That We’re Probably On The Threshold Of A Whole New Revolution”

December 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I wish I had more of a feel for pop culture than I do, but most of it leaves me cold, from comic-book film adaptations to reality TV to pop music. I just don’t care. I don’t think I’m better than it–just separate from it. 

For instance: I’ve never had any interest in Star Trek, the TV series or films. I actually feel physical pain if I have to sit through it. But creator Gene Roddenberry was obviously a special guy and not only for his progressive outlook on race and gender. In a 1976 Penthouse interview conducted by Linda Merinoff, Roddenberry laid out the next 40 years of our society, from the Internet to email to swarms and crowdsourcing to the decline of the traditional postal service to online learning to the telecommunications revolution. Three excerpts follow.

_________________________

Penthouse:

What is happening to television as a piece of mechanical equipment?

Gene Roddenberry:

I think there is little doubt that we’re probably on the threshold of a whole new revolution in telecommunications. We are now experimenting with mating television sets with print-out devices, think of TV mated with a Xerox-type machine in which probably our newspapers will ultimately be delivered. It’s a much more efficient system. The minute you put the newspaper to bed electronically, you can then push a button and any house that subscribes to the service can have the thing rolled right out of the TV set. We’re also experimenting, in some cities already, with mating television with simple computers and the home will be run by a home-computing feature. You’ll do your billing on it, your banking, probably a great part of your shopping. I think it is inescapable that we mate TV with reproducing devices, that it will become our postal system of the future, almost certainly our telephone or videophone. So I see television going in either of two directions. One is that it can become that opiate we fear. Or, used properly, it can be a way for all people, everywhere, to have access to all the recorded knowledge of all humanity.

_________________________

Penthouse:

Where do you think mankind is heading?

Gene Roddenberry:

There’s a theory I have that i’ve been making notes on for a couple of years now and intend to write a book on it sometime in the future. You often hear the question, “I wonder what the next dominant species will be?” I think that completely unnoticed by practically all people is the fact that the next dominant species on earth has already arrived and has been with us for some time. And this is a species that I call socio-organism. It first began to make its appearance when men started to gather together in tribal groups, and then city-states, and more lately in nations, giant corporations, and so on. The socio-organism is a living organism that is made up of individual cells–which are human beings. In other words the United States of America is a socio-organism. It is made up of 200 million cells, many of them become increasingly specialized just as the cells in our body do. Furnish food, take away waste products, or the nerves–the sight, the thinking, the planning. Your local PTA is also a small socio-organism. General Motors and ITT are socio-organisms. The interesting thing about this new creature is that unlike all the past life forms, one cell in a socio-organism can be a member of several of these socio-organisms. Also, they do not have to live in physical proximity with each other as in our bodies. It sounds a rather foolish sci-fi thing to say that General Motors is a living organism. But if you take a few steps back and view it from this point of view, you begin to discover that the evolution of this socio-organism almost exactly parallels everything we know about Darwinian evolution.

Briefly, Darwinian evolution is fairly generally accepted, that the first life forms on earth were individual cells floating on the warm soup seas of the time. Finally, through chance and other factors, groups of these cells discovered that by being gathered together they could get their food more efficiently, protect themselves, and become dominant over the single-cell amoebas. With humans, exactly the same thing happened. More and more individual units began to get more and more specialized. As it became more complex, with more and more highly specialized units, the creature became more and more powerful, was capable of protecting itself, taking care of its individual cells. This is a process of accumulating interdependence. The frightening thing about viewing humankind now, this way, is that the socio-organisms are really becoming more dominant than the individual. In Red China they are teaching the very lessons that our bodies have, over the centuries, taught to its cells–that we can no longer exist for ourselves. We must exist for the whole. But you can see the same thing in the United States. People now live the corporate morality. If I join a corperation, my duty is to the corperation. If the corperation says lie, cheat, steal, move here, do that, I must do it because my duty is to the whole. So if indeed civilization is following the laws of Darwinian evolution, you can predict ahead a few centuries or a few dozen or hundred centuries, until a time in which the independent individual will have totally vanished and this planet will be inhabited by totally specialized cells who function as part of these giant, living things. The great battle and great decision we humans face is whether to let this continue until we become faceless, totally interdependent organisms. Whether this is goood or bad I don’t know. You might, if it were possible, talk to a cell of my heart and say, “Look cell, are you happy?” It seems to have adapted well. Maybe this is the way it suppose to be. Maybe there is some form of mass mind, mass consciousness, when a socio-organism reaches its final form, and we will be part of it and perfectly happy to be part of it. There may be contentments and happiness in this that we presently can’t visualize. I fear it because I can’t visualize it being better than remaining a free individual. I also fear the fact that is I remain, and insist on remaining totally independent and free, that the way things are going I am to be treated as a cancer cell by the socio-organisms around me, which will find it necessary to eradicate me because I endanger the organism.

Penthouse:

What is one’s purpose in this socio-organism? Just to survive?

Gene Roddenberry:

No. My purpose… that’s a hard question. I’ll try to answer it. My purpose is to live out whatever my function may be as a part of the whole that is God. I am a piece of Him. I believe that all intelligence is a part of the whole and it may be a great cyclical thing in which we have to go on, evolving, perfecting, until we reach the point where we are God, so that we can create ourselves so that we know we existed in the first place.

_________________________

Penthouse:

You’ve said that you felt that Star Trek was a very optimistic show. Are you still that optimistic in the 70’s about the future of mankind? 

Gene Roddenberry:

Yes, but I think that if we have an earth of the Star Trek century, it will not be ab unbroken, steady rise to that kind of civilization. We’re in some very tough times. Our twentieth-century technological civilization has no guarantees that it is going to stay around for a long time. But I think man is really an incredible creature. We’ve had civilizations fall before and we build a somewhat better one on the ashes every time. And I’d never consider the society we depicted in Star Trek necessarily a direct, uninterrupted out-growth of our present civilization, with its heavy emphasis on materialism. I think But my optimism is not for our society. It’s for our essential ingredient in humankind. And I think we humans will rebuild and, if necessary, we’ll lose another civilization and rebuild again on top of that until slowly, bit by bit, we’ll get there.•

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“He Is Obsessively Focused On The Reader’s Experience”

December 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s always been a difficult balance for newspapers–and never more than it is now–to give readers what they want and what they seemingly need. From Eugene L. Meyer’s Bethesda Magazine interview with Katherine Weymouth, the Graham family member who has stayed aboard the Washington Post as publisher at the behest of new owner, Jeff Bezos:

“Question:

What can Jeff Bezos do that the Grahams couldn’t?

Katherine Weymouth:

I personally believe there’s no magic bullet. If there were, someone would’ve found it, how to transform for the digital era. But we are in a great position. We have a credible brand, deeply engaged readers, [and we] cover Washington. And now we are owned by someone with deep pockets who cares what we do and is willing to invest for the long term.

Question:

What has changed now that the Post newspaper is owned by Jeff Bezos?

Katherine Weymouth:

People have stopped wearing ties, that’s the biggest change around here. …He hasn’t yet told us what to do, not that he would. He’s buying it for all the right reasons: It’s an important institution. He said, ‘I’m an optimist by nature and, yes, I’m optimistic about the future of the Post. If not, I wouldn’t join you.’ Can he bring something to the table? He clearly does have deep pockets. By itself, that’s not enough. He is obsessively focused on the reader’s experience.

 Question:

Have you and he discussed changes you might make under his ownership that you were unable to or didn’t make before?

Katherine Weymouth:

I do not anticipate any dramatic changes. He has made it clear that he wants to build on what we do best, with a deep focus on serving our readers…[while] experimenting with new ways of presenting our journalism digitally that will create even more compelling experiences for our readers and users.”

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“Humanity Believes It Has Made One Of Its Most Major Breakthroughs: A Pill Which Will Rid Our Morality Of All Its Faults”

December 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Practical Ethics, Joao Fabiano has a smart consideration of some of the perils of neuro-modification of morality, which we will probably delay dealing with for as long as we can. But what if a violent serial criminal could be “adjusted” to no longer behave aberrantly? Sounds great and frightening. The opening:

“It is 2025. Society has increasingly realised the importance of breaking evolution’s chains and enhancing the human condition. Large grants are awarded for building sci-fi-like laboratories to search for and create the ultimate moral enhancer. After just a few years, humanity believes it has made one of its most major breakthroughs: a pill which will rid our morality of all its faults. Without any side-effects, it vastly increases our ability to cooperate and to think rationally on moral issues, while also enhancing our empathy and our compassion for the whole of humanity. By shifting individuals’ socio-value orientation towards cooperation, this pill will allow us to build safe, efficient and peaceful societies. It will cast a pro-social paradise on earth, the moral enhancer kingdom come.

I believe we better think twice before endeavouring ourselves into this pro-social paradise on the cheap. Not because we will lose ‘the X factor,’ not because it will violate autonomy, and not because such a drug would cause us to exit our own species. Even if all those objections are refuted, even if the drug has no side-effects, even if each and every human being, by miracle, willingly takes the drug without any coercion whatsoever, even then, I contend we could still have trouble.

Surprisingly, the scenario imagined in the first paragraph is not that far-fetched. The field of cognitive moral neuroscience and the study of moral cognition have been flourishing; we have already found many neurochemical manipulations which seem to alter our social and moral preferences.”

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“There Are Threats To All Embedded Systems”

December 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A passage from a new Wired interview by Alex Pasternack with security expert Bruce Schneier about safety vulnerabilities, the physical kinds and virtual ones:

“Wired:

What about attacks that affect infrastructure? Obviously the past few years have shown that industry, cities, utilities, even vehicles are vulnerable to hacking. Are those serious threats?

 Bruce Schneier:

There are threats to all embedded systems. We’ve seen groups mostly at universities hacking into medical devices, hacking into automobiles, into various security cameras, and demonstrating the vulnerabilities. There’s not a lot of fixing at this time. The industries are still largely ignoring the problem, maybe very much like the computer industry did maybe twenty years ago, when they belittled the problem, pretended it wasn’t there. But we’ll get there.

When I look at the bigger embedded systems, the power grids, various infrastructure systems in cities, there are vulnerabilities. I worry about them a little less because they’re so obscure. But I still think we need to start figuring out how to fix them, because I think there are a lot of hidden vulnerabilities in embedded systems.

 Wired:

Are there particular security concerns right now that you think the public, given its misunderstanding about security, doesn’t appreciate enough?

 Bruce Schneier:

I’m most worried about potential security vulnerabilities in the powerful institutions we’re trusting with our data, with our security. I’m worried about companies like Google and Microsoft and Facebook. I’m worried about governments, the US and other governments. I’m worried about how they are using our data, how they’re storing our data, and what happens to it. I’m less worried about the criminals. I think we’ve kinda got cyber-crime under control, it’s not zero but it never will be. I’m much more worried about the powerful abusing us than the un-powerful abusing us.”

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“If It Works, Private Car Ownership As We Know It Is Probably Going To Disappear In The World’s Biggest Cities”

December 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You could tell me anything really far-fetched about technology right now, and I couldn’t readily dismiss it, even if I thought you were probably lying. So reports about gigantic vending machines in China dispensing electric cars didn’t really make me blink. Unlike Mark Rogowsky of Forbes, however, I’m not high on the potential of this disruptive business model. The opening of his recent breathless article about Kandi Technologies:

“China is growing so fast it’s sometimes difficult to get different sources to even agree which the biggest cities are and how many people live in them. But that said, among them is a name unfamiliar to most Americans, the city of Hangzhou, located in eastern China, and home to 8.7 million as of 2010. That would make it the biggest city in the U.S. even though it’s barely a third the size of Shanghai, the world’s largest. But Hangzhou isn’t just big, it’s also home to an ambitious experiment that combines electric vehicles, giant vending machines and a Zipcar-like business model. Oh, and if it works, private car ownership as we know it is probably going to disappear in the world’s biggest cities.”

“Critics Blame The Concentration Of The Machines For An Increase In Chronic Gambling”

December 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My one Libertarian streak is that I’ve always believed that consenting adults shouldn’t be limited in what they can do with their time and money and bodies. Children should be protected–I don’t see why grade schoolers are even allowed to play tackle football or eat at fast-food restaurants–but grown-ups are grown-ups and should be treated as such.

But it’s tougher for me to maintain this stance over time, simply because some behaviors have costs (financial and social) that can plague us for generations, whether we’re talking about drugs or gambling or other behaviors. The crack epidemic in NYC led to broken homes that sadly reverberate to this day, damaging children who weren’t even alive during the crisis. Of course, the War on Drugs does little to combat these problems and just creates a black market, so I don’t know if there’s any good answer. But whenever there’s a ballot initiative regarding casinos, which are supposedly going to boost the economy, I know it’s fool’s gold. The attendant problems of such establishments take from the economy at least as much as they give back. From Elisabetta Povoledo in the New York Times:

“PAVIA, Italy — Renowned for its universities and a celebrated Renaissance monastery, this Lombardy town about 25 miles south of Milan has in recent years earned another, more dubious, distinction: the gambling capital of Italy.

Slot machines and video lottery terminals, known as V.L.T.s, can be found all over in coffee bars and tobacco shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop shops and shopping malls, not to mention 13 dedicated gambling halls. By some counts, there is one slot machine or V.L.T. for every 104 of the city’s 68,300 residents.

Critics blame the concentration of the machines for an increase in chronic gambling — and debt, bankruptcies, depression, domestic violence and broken homes — recorded by social service workers in Pavia.

But in many ways, Pavia is merely the most extreme example of the spread of gambling throughout Italy since lawmakers significantly relaxed regulation of the gambling industry a decade ago.”

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“You Got A Shot At Going All The Way”

December 29, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Robert Evans’ second memoir, The Fat Lady Sang, featuring his customary blend of hard-boiled talk and Hollywoodisms, is excerpted in the Telegraph. The passage has to do with his relationship with Frank Sinatra, which went to pot over Mia Farrow’s decision to star in Rosemary’s Baby. The opening:

“‘Kid, you remind me of me. Been watching you close. They tell me you’re comin’ off great. Been around long enough to have a nose who’s going to make it and who ain’t. You got a shot at going all the way. Take some advice from a guy who’s never learnt. When it comes to those hangers-on, though, take my advice: have your radar on high.’ The words were coming straight from the mouth of the King, Frank Sinatra by name, having a mano-a-mano powwow at Chasen’s, his favourite restaurant in town.

It was spring of ’59. He was a megastar playing the lead role in the filmization of the Broadway musical Can-Can.

Me? A punk starlet, playing my first starring role in The Hell-Bent Kid, a western remake of Kiss of Death. Screen-tested and plucked it away from many. Can-Can and The Kid − hell-bent, that is − were shooting on adjoining soundstages at 20th Century Fox.

The laugh being that it was he who sought me out, and with purpose, not by mistake.

He was wondering, how does a punk kid not yet hitting the quarter-century mark end up in the biblical sense with the two great loves of his life?

Adding insult to injury, the Chairman’s spies told him I’d been seeing both of them at the same time. Their names? Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.”

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“Unfortunately, Not All Facts Are So Clear-Cut”

December 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From “A.I. Has Grown Up and Left Home,” David Auerbach’s Nautilus article about how the field may be hamstrung by too much concern over how thinking “works,” a passage about the frustrations of the Cyc project:

“Unfortunately, not all facts are so clear-cut. Take the statement ‘Cats have four legs.’ Some cats have three legs, and perhaps there is some mutant cat with five legs out there. (And Cat Stevens only has two legs.) So Cyc needed a more complicated rule, like ‘Most cats have four legs, but some cats can have fewer due to injuries, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a cat could have more than four legs.’ Specifying both rules and their exceptions led to a snowballing programming burden.

After more than 25 years, Cyc now contains 5 million assertions. Lenat has said that 100 million would be required before Cyc would be able to reason like a human does. No significant applications of its knowledge base currently exist, but in a sign of the times, the project in recent years has begun developing a ‘Terrorist Knowledge Base.’ Lenat announced in 2003 that Cyc had ‘predicted’ the anthrax mail attacks six months before they had occurred. This feat is less impressive when you consider the other predictions Cyc had made, including the possibility that Al Qaeda might bomb the Hoover Dam using trained dolphins.”

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“The Federal Health Exchange, Healthcare.gov, Received 880,000 Visitors Dec. 24”

December 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I know it’s been bandied about that there’s no low-hanging fruit left for the American economy, but what will the impact be job-wise if we end up having universal health coverage (or near-universal)? Will it create a large amount of employment opportunities and have residual positive effects on the economy? I have to think tens of millions of newly insured people will be a boon not only from a humanistic viewpoint but from a financial one as well. But I’m not an economist, so I can’t answer that. What I can tell you from my own experience of having worked for Internet companies is that it’s ludicrous to think that the rollout was bumpy because it was done by the public sector. The same thing happens regularly in the private sector. There are tons of IT workers in America, and most of them are mediocre at best. At any rate, it seems that many of the bugs in the ACA site have been worked out. From USA Today:

“WASHINGTON–The federal health exchange, Healthcare.gov, received 880,000 visitors Dec. 24, the last day people could enroll to receive health coverage on Jan. 1, officials say.

‘We’re going to do everything we can to ensure a smooth transition period for consumers whose coverage begins on January 1,’ Julie Bataille wrote in a blog Friday. Bataille serves as director of the office of communications for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘And we’re going to continue to work to ensure every American who still wants to enroll in Marketplace coverage by the end of the open enrollment period is able to do so.’

Consumers have until March 31 to enroll on the health insurance exchanges to avoid paying a fine with their 2015 taxes for not having health insurance.

More than a million people visited the site over the weekend, and 600,000 had hit the page by mid-day Monday — the original deadline for Jan. 1 coverage.”

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