Excerpts

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“32 Percent Say It’s Challenging Or Frustrating To Go Online”

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

It seems impossible that a considerable number of Americans are willing and able to avoid the Internet, but it’s true. A breakdown of why they shun the dominant media of our time, from Greg Sterling of Marketing Land:

“In terms of the reasons for not going online, Pew found the following:

  • 34 percent believe the Internet isn’t relevant to their lives; they have no interest or need
  • 32 percent say it’s challenging or frustrating to go online; some of these people are also afraid of spam, spyware, and hackers’
  • 19 percent don’t want or can’t afford to pay for a computer and the associated access cost
  • 7 percent ‘cited a physical lack of availability or access to the Internet’

Some of these non-Internet users (44 percent) have asked family/friends to go online for them. Another group (23 percent) live in households where the Internet is available. And another contingent (14 percent) are ex-Internet users.

Most of these non-users are quite content to remain offline, with only 8 percent saying they would like to go online or use email. What that then suggests is that US Internet penetration has reached almost all of the ‘addressable market.'”

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“It’s Not A Zero-Sum Game”

September 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Economist Robert Reich, small but perky like a Tina Fey tit, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit to promote his new documentary, Inequality for All. He makes the comment that “the rich have done the best when everyone else is doing well.” That’s historically true, but have the rich ever done better than they’re doing now? (I’m talking about the super-rich, of course.) What’s really bad for most has been great for them. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Professor Reich, you are a noted supporter of free trade and outsourcing. From a neoliberal economics perspective, these policies are justifiable, but don’t they dramatically undermine the bargaining power of the American working class?

Robert Reich:

Not if they’re done correctly. For example, our trade treaties should require that our trading partners have a minimum wage that’s half their nations’ median wage (and we should do the same) — thereby helping ensure that the benefits of trade are spread widely.

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Question:

You appear to be a strong advocate for growing the economy as a way to pay off America’s debt obligations. What are your thoughts on the idea that economic growth is ultimately unsustainable, given the accelerated depletion of key natural resources that would be required to fuel such growth?

Robert Reich:

Growth isn’t the problem. It’s what the growth is used for. Rich economies have healthier environments than poor economies in large part because they can afford to protect their environments. Productivity gains — through invention and innovation — will enable us to save more energy in the future. But we need a carbon tax to get incentives right.

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Question:

Realistically, what are some policies that could pass this Congress that would be good for the country. We hear so much about what wouldn’t pass, but where is there bipartisanship. I’d love your input, Professor.

Robert Reich: 

I think the Democrats should introduce a bill to raise the minimum wage to at least $10.50/hour — which is what it would be if the 1968 minimum wage had just kept up with inflation. The vast majority of Americans agree. Many Republicans would come along. It would be a worthy fight.

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Question:

Professor Reich, I am a big fan and looking forward to seeing the film. However, I believe the rich & powerful in this country actively DO NOT want a successful middle class in the U.S., because that means the laborers have too much power. (Also a reason why they’re against Obamacare – health insurance binds people to jobs they hate.) As it is now, employees are scared to ask for raises and demand better working conditions. Multinationals can do better selling to China, India, Brazil etc. What can we do about this situation?

Robert Reich:

Look at American history and you’ll see that the rich have done the best when everyone else is doing well. Today’s rich would do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy (growing because the middle class and poor had a larger share) than their currently large share of an economy that’s barely growing at all. It’s not a zero-sum game.•

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“Clean Water May Be The Biggest Lifesaver In History”

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

From “Why Are You Not Dead Yet?” Laura Helmuth’s recent Slate article examining how the American lifespan doubled in the last century and a half:

“How did we go from the miseries of the past to our current expectation of long and healthy lives? ‘Most people credit medical advances,’ says David Jones, a medical historian at Harvard—’but most historians would not.’ One problem is the timing. Most of the effective medical treatments we recognize as saving our lives today have been available only since World War II: antibiotics, chemotherapy, drugs to treat high blood pressure. But the steepest increase in life expectancy occurred from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Even some dramatically successful medical treatments such as insulin for diabetics have kept individual people alive—send in those #NotDeadYet stories!—but haven’t necessarily had a population-level impact on average lifespan. We’ll examine the second half of the 20th century in a later story, but for now let’s look at the bigger early drivers of the doubled lifespan.

The credit largely goes to a wide range of public health advances, broadly defined, some of which were explicitly aimed at preventing disease, others of which did so only incidentally. ‘There was a whole suite of things that occurred simultaneously,’ says S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Mathematically, the interventions that saved infants and children from dying of communicable disease had the greatest impact on lifespan. (During a particularly awful plague in Europe, James Riley points out in Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History, the average life expectancy could temporarily drop by five years.) And until the early 20th century, the most common age of death was in infancy.

Clean water may be the biggest lifesaver in history.”

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“More Than 40,000 People Adopted Hilda’s Number”

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

A brief anecdote from Adrianne Jeffries at the Verge about how Social Security numbers, which were not actually intended to be national ID numbers, were misused and confused from the start:

“Social Security numbers were poorly understood from the beginning. In 1938, a leather factory in Lockport, New York attempted to capitalize on the excitement around the country’s newly-formed social insurance program by tucking duplicate Social Security cards into its wallets. Company vice president and treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be cute to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Schrader Whitcher.

Real Social Security cards had just begun circulating the year before, so many Americans were confused. Even though the display card was marked ‘specimen’ and sold at Woolworth’s, more than 40,000 people adopted Hilda’s number as their own. According to the Social Security Administration, no fewer than 12 people were still using their Woolworth’s-issued SSN in 1977.”

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“Maybe The Human Eye Can’t Do Better”

September 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I’ve said before that I favor computers calling balls and strikes in baseball as soon as that becomes viable. A human error can decide the outcome of a game, but it should be a miscue by a player, not an official. Until the system is automated, umpires should be paid much better than starvation wages in the minor leagues, which is the case now. With no guarantee of ever making it and no real salary, it’s hard to attract and keep the best. That leads to the most stubborn people, not the most qualified ones, ending up in the majors. That’s why you see so many argumentative umps in the bigs.

From “Five Important Issues for Next Commish.” by David Schoenfield at ESPN:

“Instant replay and quality of umpiring 

We finally get expanded replay next season, so that should help resolve some of the controversial and blown calls. It remains to be seen how effective and efficient the system will be, but it can be adjusted as necessary. Just as importantly, the new commissioner has to work to improve consistency of ball/strike calls and reduce the episodes of ump rage. 

Right now, the best umps (Eric Cooper, Chad Fairchild, Phil Cuzzi) get about 90 percent of ball/strike calls correct, according to our pitch data; the worst umps (Wally Bell, Tim Welke, Kerwin Danley, Jerry Meals) are at 86 percent. That difference may not seem like a lot, but that’s a spread of 10 incorrect calls per 250 pitches. Even a 90 percent correct rate means thebest umps are missing about 25 to 30 ball/strike calls a game. Maybe the human eye can’t do better, but MLB needs to pay its umpire better, and in particular pay minor league umpires a living wage, so you can recruit from a wider field of candidates.”

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“He Is An Artist Who Creates His Mystic And Original Work”

September 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Michelangelo Antonioni was great at many things, but he never filmed sex or dance convincingly. Why was that? Self-consciousness? Guilt? In 1970, at the time of his remarkably infamous film, Zabriskie Point, the director was given the cover treatment by Look. An excerpt from the article:

“When Blow-Up became a money-maker in the U.S., Antonioni had a prompt invitation from MGM to do a film here. Partly because of Antonioni’s temperamental reputation, MGM officials kept their distance. He went to the Chicago convention (where he was Maced), SDS meetings and the Free Church at Berkeley, arousing suspicions in some vigilant quarters that he might be going to emphasize the trouble spots of America. MGM still claims it doesn’t know what Zabriskie Point, an expensive production, is all about.

Antonioni worked on his script with two young American writers, Sam Shepard and Fred Gardner. No one was permitted to discuss the ever-changing plot (‘political events go by too fast for the cinema to keep up’). His company never knew where they would work the following day. Press agents and crew members, unused to his impromptu methods, were fired.

‘Our relationship was purely platonic,’ Mark Frechette says of the director, because Antonioni (politely embarrassed by Mark’s ardor for a ‘spiritual revolution’) never discussed with him the character he was playing, although he spent hours with Daria [Halprin]. Rangers at Death Valley National Monument clashed with hippie members of the Open Theatre during filming of a love-in. College militants didn’t trust Antonioni and suspected he was exploiting them.

So it went. No matter what he did, Antonioni provoked resentment. His maverick methods hark back to the times of I-am-the-boss directors D. W. Griffith and Josef von Sternberg. He is an artist who creates his mystic and original work in absolute control of what he wants, and to hell with busybodies and gossips who don’t understand. Long before this point in his career, he had been bruised by censorship of church and state in Europe. A tense man with a nervous facial tic, Antonioni has become superstitious, suspicious and easily hurt.

Within the shell of his absorption in his work, he is genuinely surprised that some people don’t ‘like’ him. He ‘likes’ Americans and is amused at himself for thinking them a much happier people than he expected. At his return to Rome, he announced that his fellow Italians were unbelievably provincial compared to Americans and were still vainly arguing problems that Americans had resolved 50 years ago.

‘America has changed me,’ he says. ‘I am now a much less private person, more open, prepared to say more. I have even changed my view of sexual love. In my other films, I looked upon sex as a disease of love. I learned here that sex is only a part of love; to be open and understanding of each other, as the girls and boys of today are, is the important part. But it is not fair to ask questions of me before I put my picture together. The responsibility is mine. It is me in front of the camera saying what I feel about my America.'”

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“Even That Whispered Conversation In The Park May No Longer Be Safe From Prying Ears”

September 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can legislate what can barely be seen, but enforcement is something else. From “Matchstick-Sized Sensor Can Record Your Private Chats,” a post by Jim Nash at New Scientist about what used to be between you and I:

“EVERYONE knows that to have a private chat in the NSA era, you go outdoors. Phones, the internet, email and your office can all be compromised with ease. But soon even that whispered conversation in the park may no longer be safe from prying ears.

Carrying out covert audio surveillance along a city street or a wooded path, say, currently requires parabolic microphones, which look like large, clear salad bowls and need a direct, unobstructed view of the subject. Hardly 007 territory.

Now, a Dutch acoustics firm, Microflown Technologies, has developed a matchstick-sized sensor that can pinpoint and record a target’s conversations from a distance.

Known as an acoustic vector sensor, Microflown’s sensor measures the movement of air, disturbed by sound waves, to almost instantly locate where a sound originated. It can then identify the noise and, if required, transmit it live to waiting ears.”

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“What She Made Me Think About Is Bioengineering”

September 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Margaret Atwood: Our Most Important Prophet of Doom,” Judith Shulevitz’s New Republic meditation about bioengineering, which has the potential to be wonderful and terrible:

“Every generation takes for granted beliefs or practices that strike later generations as unconscionable. Just try explaining to your children public executions, chattel slavery, or eugenics. Your offspring will gape, stunned, until it dawns on them that the society you’re raising them to take part in has an astonishing capacity not to think things through. So, what’s not being thought through right now? The competition is stiff: the continued use of fossil fuels when catastrophic storms batter our shores, feeding our children off toxin-leaching plastic tableware, etc., etc.

You’d think that the professionals most likely to predict our regrets would be statisticians, trained as they are to rank the likelihood of negative outcomes. But prognostication of this sort is more gift than skill, since you need a finely tuned moral sensor as much as, if not more than, advanced numeracy. You can’t say what history will deem barbaric unless you feel a punch in the stomach every time you encounter it. This is why it was a novelist, not a statistician, who first sounded the alarm—for me—about a fast-tumbling cascade of changes I hadn’t thought hard about before.

The novelist is Margaret Atwood. What she made me think about is bioengineering.”

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“Hey, This Thing Is Happening Without Us”

September 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Following up his authorized Steve Jobs bio, Walter Isaacson is writing a book about the icons of the Digital Era. Let’s hope he employs a large team of fact-checkers because such people tend to be fabulists. There’s an excerpt at Harvard Magazine from the forthcoming volume, about Bill Gates, who’s told a yarn or two in his day and is no stranger to the author. The opening:

“IT MAY HAVE BEEN the most momentous purchase of a magazine in the history of the Out of Town Newsstand in Harvard Square. Paul Allen, a college dropout from Seattle, wandered into the cluttered kiosk one snowy day in December 1974 and saw that the new issue of Popular Electronics featured a home computer for hobbyists, called the Altair, that was just coming on the market. He was both exhilarated and dismayed. Although thrilled that the era of the ‘personal’ computer seemed to have arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down 75 cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slush to the Currier House room of Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore and fellow computer fanatic from Lakeside High School in Seattle, who had convinced Allen to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. ‘Hey, this thing is happening without us,’ Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.

What Gates and Allen set out to do, during the Christmas break of 1974 and the subsequent January reading period when Gates was supposed to be studying for exams, was to create the software for personal computers. ‘When Paul showed me that magazine, there was no such thing as a software industry,’ Gates recalled. ‘We had the insight that you could create one. And we did.’ Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, ‘That was the most important idea that I ever had.’

In high school, Gates had formed the Lakeside Programming Group, which made money writing computer code for companies in the Pacific Northwest. As a senior, he applied only to three colleges—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—and he took different approaches to each. ‘I was born to apply for college,’ he said, fully aware of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized the month he had spent in Washington as a congressional page. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three, and chose Harvard. ‘There are going to be some guys at Harvard who are smarter than you,’ Allen warned him. Gates replied, ‘No way! No way!'”

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“The Computer Is My Timekeeper, It Is My Courier And Library”

September 25, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I clearly have no qualms about reading off of a screen, but posting Junot Diaz’s improvised reading list made me think of this passage from Terrence Holt’s “Charybdis,” a short story about a troubled space mission to Jupiter:

“The computer is my timekeeper, it is my courier and library. It stores in its memory the pages I call up on the screen. For my collection I chose Shakespeare, Melville, the old myths. My crewmates left their libraries with me. Stern loved mysteries; Peterson was more a western man.

I spend hours at the screen now, and though I am grateful for the machine, it leaves me skeptical. I wish often for the weight, or at least the solidity, of a book, instead of the image of words on glass. The transience of the picture worries me, and I have caught myself calling back earlier pages, comparing them to my own memory to see if the text has been altered by the computer’s traffic with so much other information. Sometimes, I am tantalized by a suspicion—surely that word was not noses, but something starting with a g; and that was cave, not save; not screen, but—I catch myself, and read on.”

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“G.M. Crops Have Been Consumed By Hundreds Of Millions Of People Across The World For More Than Fifteen Years With No Reported Ill Effects”

September 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

It would be a good idea for us to not be close-minded about genetically modified and lab-grown foods, because we’re going to need them eventually. The climate that supports our agrarian culture won’t last forever. Sure, be vigilant with all food corporations regardless of what they’re producing, but don’t set your default mode to artificial = evil. There’s apparently a new fear-mongering documentary about the perils of GMOs that has the blessing of Oprah chucklehead, Dr. Oz. At the New Yorker blog, Michael Specter cuts through the bullshit. The opening of his post:

“I recently watched OMG GMO, Jeremy Seifert’s aggressively uninformed ‘documentary’ about the corporate duplicity and governmental callousness that he says drives the production of genetically engineered crops—which are, in his view, such barely concealed poisons that he actually dressed his children in full hazmat gear before letting them enter a field of genetically modified corn. Seifert explained his research process in an interview with Nathanael Johnson of Grist: ‘I didn’t really dig too deep into the scientific aspect.’

Fair enough. Normally, I would ignore anyone who would say that while publicizing his movie. But Seifert has been abetted by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the patron saint of internally inconsistent scientific assertions, and Seifert’s message of fear and illiteracy has now been placed before millions of television viewers.

Seifert asserts that the scientific verdict is still out on the safety of G.M. foods—which I guess it is, unless you consult actual scientists. He fails to do that. Instead, he claims that the World Health Organization is one of many groups that question the safety of genetically engineered products. However, the W.H.O. has been consistent in its position on G.M.O.s: ‘No effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of G.M. foods by the general population in the countries where they have been approved.’ Britain’s Royal Society of Medicine was even more declarative: ‘Foods derived from G.M. crops have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people across the world for more than fifteen years with no reported ill effects (or legal cases related to human health) despite many of the consumers coming from that most litigious of countries the U.S.A.’ In addition to the W.H.O. and Royal Society, scientific organizations from around the world, including the European Commission and, in the United States, the National Academy of Sciences, have strongly endorsed the safety of G.M. foods. I could cite quotes from a dozen other countries. But let’s leave the overkill to Mr. Seifert.

What else can you call it when a man sends his children into a field of genetically modified corn wearing gas masks?”•

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“There Are Fish In My Phone”

September 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some studies suggest we’re more honest if we feel we’re being watched, even if the eyes aren’t human. A well-placed painting with an observing face seems to have a profound effect on our behavior. In a similar vein: Can nature received through technology be a reasonable replacement for actual nature? The opening of Sue Thomas’ new Aeon article, “Technobiophilia“:

“There are fish in my phone. Some are pure orange with white fins; others have black mottled markings along their orange backs. They glide, twist and turn above a bed of flat pale sand fringed by rocks and the bright green leaves of something that looks like watercress. Sometimes they swim out of view, leaving me to gaze at the empty scene in the knowledge that they will soon reappear. When I gently press my finger against the screen, the water ripples and the fish swim away. Eventually, they cruise out from behind the Google widget, appear from underneath the Facebook icon, or sneak around the corner of Contacts. This is Koi Live Wallpaper, an app designed for smartphones. The idea of an aquarium inside my phone appeals to my sense of humour and makes me smile. But I suspect its true appeal is more complicated than that.

In 1984, the psychiatrist Aaron Katcher and his team at the University of Pennsylvania conducted an experiment in the busy waiting room of a dentist’s office. On some days, before the surgery opened, the researchers installed an aquarium with tropical fish. On other days, they took it away. They measured the patients’ levels of anxiety in both environments, and the results were clear. On ‘aquarium days’, patients were less anxious and more compliant during the surgery. Katcher concluded that the presence of these colourful living creatures had a calming influence on people about to receive dental treatment. Then in 1990, Judith Heerwagen and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle found the same calming effect using a large nature mural instead of an aquarium in the waiting room of a specialist ‘dental fears’ clinic. A third experiment by the environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich and colleagues at Texas A&M University in 2003 found that stressed blood donors experienced lowered blood pressure and pulse rates while sitting in a room where a videotape of a nature scene was playing. The general conclusion was that visual exposure to nature not only diminished patient stress but also reduced physical pain. I’m not in pain when I look at my mobile, though I might well be stressed. Is that why I take time to gaze at my virtual aquarium?

A simple answer to this question is no. Katcher’s fish were real. Mine are animations. But there is increasing evidence that we respond very similarly to a ‘natural’ environment, whether it’s real or virtual, and research confirms that even simulated nature experiences can be remarkably powerful.”

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“He Says There Are Business Pillars From Amazon.com That Can Apply To The Newspaper Industry”

September 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can’t fret too much about what Jeff Bezos aims to do with the Washington Post because the paper’s only plans before its sale were funeral plans. His experimentation with a last-legs property is the best-case for all involved–and we’re all involved. From an ABC News interview with him:

“While Bezos doesn’t plan to turn one of the nation’s leading newspapers into a shopping site, he certainly plans to get more out of the business and he says there are business pillars from Amazon.com that can apply to the newspaper industry

‘The big things that we focus on at Amazon, those serve the Amazon customers well and they would transfer to other kinds of businesses,’ Bezos said in a sit-down interview with ABC News earlier. ‘The first thing is put the customer first. If you have a party, are you holding the party for your guests or for yourself?

‘Sometimes people hold parties and they pretend it is for their guests, but they are holding it for themselves. The second is we like to invent. The third piece is we are willing to think long term.’

‘Customer centricity, willingness to invent and willingness to be patient,’ Bezos said, citing tenets that were applicable to a number of industries when asked directly how he could bring aspects of Amazon’s business to the newspaper and media business.

Ultimately, we don’t know much about what Bezos, whose net worth is said to be $27.2 billion, will do tactically at the Post, but it is clear that, above all, he is dedicated and focused on bringing the paper into the 21st century.”

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“I Want To Be Able To Speak With Errors In My Wording, Errors In My Grammar”

September 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Auto-correct, that imperfect thing, is both boon and bane. Steve Wozniak wants his spoken words corrected also. From the Apple co-founder’s interview with Nate Lanxon of Wired UK:

“Since doing so in the 1970s with Steve Jobs, Wozniak has turned much of his attention, time and money to education and new businesses. Presently serving as chief scientist at flash storage company Fusion-io, he also readily invests in new technologies and applications. ‘The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn’t thought of before,’ says Wozniak, ‘and that aren’t talked about in the news all the time.’

High on the list of ideal candidates are apps that take a smarter approach to the use of human speech, ones ‘where you talk to it like a normal person,’ he says, ‘the way you would talk to a human being.’

‘I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar,’ he continues. ‘When you type things into Google search it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know ‘no, he couldn’t have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.’ That’s going to take a lot of software, a lot of artificial intelligence work over the next five to ten years.'”

 

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“There Will Never Be Enough Philanthropists To Restore The Status Quo Ante”

September 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a recent Reuters column that reminds that hard news was never commercially viable in America, Jack Shafer makes an excellent suggestion that will almost definitely be ignored: that ABC become a non-profit arm of ESPN, doing serious journalism as a public good. An excerpt:

“As philanthropists take the seat in the story room once held by politicians, we should be glad. But not too glad, because there will never be enough philanthropists to restore the status quo ante. Nor will the market create enough billionaires like Jeff Bezos who are willing to rescue drowning newspapers like the Washington Post. Wishful thinkers — I’m one — can hope for media giants like Bloomberg and ESPN, now the most valuable media property in the United States, to be persuaded to add noncommercial news to their bundles. (Perhaps ABC News, which is owned by one of ESPN’s co-owners, could be repositioned as the noncommercial face of ESPN.)”

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“The Computer Reveals What Plays They Used Under What Conditions And How Often”

September 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I tend to think of analytics in sports as a recent invention, but Tom Landry, square-jawed coach of America’s Team–God’s Team, really–the Dallas Cowboys, was apparently a computer-friendly technocrat back in the 1970s. From “Tom Landry Is a Believer: in Himself, His Printouts, His Cowboys and His Lord,” Kent Demaret’s 1977 People article about the laconic leader:

“The process starts on Monday. Game films from the day before are shown, and each player’s performance evaluated and graded. That done, Landry turns to computer printouts—bound into a book the size of the Manhattan phone directory—for a minute analysis of the next opponent. The computer reveals what plays they used under what conditions and how often. As the week progresses Landry and his coaching staff absorb the mass of data, design countermoves and settle on a game plan for both offense and defense. The offense is rarely changed. ‘You don’t spend three days working up a game plan and getting all the players ready, only to change it during a 10-minute halftime,’ Landry says. ‘You just go out there and execute it better than they can execute a defense against it.’ Such intensive preparation motivates the team, he adds, far more successfully than locker room histrionics. ‘Confidence comes from knowing what you’re doing,’ says Landry. ‘If you are prepared for something, you usually do it. If not, you usually fall flat on your face.’

Not all those who now play or have played for Landry admire his push-button approach.”•

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“I’m one of the best-known cowboys in Texas,” 1986:

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“We Can Destroy Privacy, We Really Can”

September 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I know I said I would stop, but there is one more interview from David Frost’s 1970 book, The Americans, that I want to excerpt. It’s an exchange about privacy the host had with Ramsey Clark, the noted Department of Justice lawyer. At the outset of this segment, Clark is commenting about wiretapping, though he broadens his remarks to regard privacy in general:

Ramsey Clark:

[It’s] an immense waste, an immoral sort of thing.

David Frost:

Immoral in what sense?

Ramsey Clark:

Well, immoral in the sense that government has to be fair. Government has to concede the dignity of its citizens. If the government can’t protect its citizens with fairness, we’re in real trouble, aren’t we? And it’s always ironic to me that those who urge wiretapping strongest won’t give more money for police salaries to bring real professionalism and real excellence to law enforcement, which is so essential to our safety.

They want an easy way, they want a cheap way. They want a way that demeans the integrity of the individual, of all of our citizens. We can’t overlook the capabilities of our technology. We can destroy privacy, we really can. We have techniques now–and we’re only on the threshold of discovery–that can permeate brick walls three feet thick. 

David Frost:

How? What sorts of things?

Ramsey Clark:

You can take a laser beam and you put it on a resonant surface within the room, and you can pick up any vibration in that room, any sound within that room, from half a mile away.

David Frost:

I think that’s terrifying.

Ramsey Clark:

You know, we can do it with sound and lights, in other words, visual-audio invasion of privacy is possible, and if we really worked at it with the technology that we have, in a few years we could destroy privacy as we know it.

Privacy is pretty hard to retain anyway in a mass society, a highly urbanized society, and if we don’t discipline ourselves now to traditions of privacy and to traditions of the integrity of the individual, we can have a generation of youngsters quite soon that won’t know what it meant because it wasn’t here when they came.•

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“Competitions Between Societies, Which Historically Took The Form Of Warfare, Drive The Evolution Of Complex Societies”

September 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Did agriculture lead to complex societies or was it something less nurturing? Cliodynamics provides an alternative cause: war. From Klint Finley at Wired:

“The standard theory, which [Peter] Turchin calls the ‘bottom up’ theory, is that humans invented agriculture around 10,000 years ago, providing resource surpluses that freed people up for other ventures. But what Turchin and his team have found is that the bottom-up theory is wrong, or at least incomplete. ‘Competitions between societies, which historically took the form of warfare, drive the evolution of complex societies,’ he says.

To test the two competing theories, Turchin and company designed two mathematical models for predicting the spread of complex societies. One based only on agriculture, ecology and geography. The other included those three factors, plus warfare. Then, they used data from historical atlases to determine whether these models matched up with the way the different states and empires actually evolved.

The model that included warfare predicted about 65 percent of the historical variance, while the agricultural model explained only about 16 percent, suggesting that warfare was more important in the spread of social norms that lead to complex societies.”

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“You Might Not Have Heard A Peep About It Since The Halcyon Days Of 2006”

September 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

My knowledge of Second Life doesn’t go far beyond the episode of the American version of The Office in which Jim hassled Dwight, avatar to avatar, with harasser emerging diminished, realizing the great distance between himself and his ideal of himself. The game that desired to mirror our modern world, while no longer so prominent in the popular culture, still apparently chugs along. From “Second Life’s Strange Second Life,”  Chris Stokel-Walker’s Verge article:

“Do you remember Second Life? Set up by developer Linden Lab in 2003, it was the faithful replication of our modern world where whoring, drinking, and fighting were acceptable. It was the place where big brands moved in as neighbors and hawked you their wares online. For many, it was the future — our lives were going to be lived online, as avatars represented us in nightclubs, bedrooms, and banks made of pixels and code. 

In the mid-2000s, every self-respecting media outlet sent reporters to the Second Life world to cover the parallel-universe beat. The BBC, (now Bloomberg) Businessweek, and NBC Nightly News all devoted time and coverage to the phenomenon. Amazon, American Apparel, and Disney set up shop in Second Life, aiming to capitalize on the momentum it was building — and to play to the in-world consumer base, which at one point in 2006 boasted a GDP of $64 million. 

Of course, stratospheric growth doesn’t continue forever, and when the universe’s expansion slowed and the novelty of people living parallel lives wore off, the media moved on. So did businesses — but not users. Linden Lab doesn’t share historical user figures, but it says the population of Second Life has been relatively stable for a number of years.

You might not have heard a peep about it since the halcyon days of 2006, but that doesn’t mean Second Life has gone away. Far from it: this past June it celebrated its 10th birthday, and it is still a strong community. A million active users still log on and inhabit the world every month, and 13,000 newbies drop into the community every day to see what Second Lifeis about. I was one of them, and I found out that just because Second Life is no longer under the glare of the media’s spotlight, it doesn’t mean the culture inside the petri dish isn’t still growing.”•

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“It is not a game–it is a multi-user virtual environment”:

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“I Ate Sweet Figs And Grass”

September 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The late Robert “Gypsy Boots” Bootzin was a beatnik and a hippie and a commune member and a vegetarian and a health-food salesman and a fitness expert long before those things were part of mainstream American culture. In essence, he seemed eccentric because he was right and in the minority. Here he is in the 1955 (at the 15:35 mark) amusing Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life.

From his 2004 obituary in the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Los Angeles – Gypsy Boots, a California fitness icon, author and health guru who paved the way for generations of beatniks, hippies and health-food junkies, has died at age 89.

Boots, born Robert Bootzin, died early Sunday at a convalescent home in Camarillo after a brief illness, said his son, Daniel Bootzin.

Born Aug. 19, 1915, in San Francisco to Jewish immigrant parents, Boots defined what it meant to live close to nature decades before the nation’s current obsession with organic foods, yoga and exercise.

During his life, he tried a number of careers, from author to entertainer to hay baler to trendy restaurateur – but never shed his long hair and thick beard or his passion for natural foods and a near-Spartan existence.

‘What people have a hard time understanding is that in the early 1960s, there were no hippies and nobody had long hair, nobody had a beard,’ said Daniel Bootzin. ‘He really was that way way before anybody had that look. As a child, I was painfully aware that he was extremely different than anybody else.'”

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“The Tesla Is A Bit Like The Apollo Moon Landings”

September 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I look askance at any article, like Bill Roberson’s new Digital Trends piece, which compares the course-altering effect of JFK’s Space Race pronouncement to Elon Musk’s push for electric cars. It’s overheated, but who knows, perhaps the latter will have a more profound influence on our environment. From the article, which also provides a historical look at the impact of automobiles:

“The Tesla is a bit like the Apollo moon landings. In truth, the lunar missions came before their time. We were supposed to orbit, build a space station platform, then head for new worlds. But President Kennedy’s space race with the Soviets lead the U.S. to leapfrog the Step 2 Space Station and throw for the end zone. Nice catch, NASA.

The Model S is making the electric car market do much the same thing. Logically, we should all be driving the offspring of the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight: cars with gas engines and electric motors mixed together for high mileage and unlimited range with no ‘anxiety.’ Hybrids, in all their forms, were supposed to be the bridge from gas to the all-electric future. But Mr. Musk changed the equation and now everyone is chasing the Model S, years ahead of schedule.

That the car is so tremendously good at this stage in its development cycle is a credit to Mr. Musk’s engineering prowess and his able employees. But years from now, history will show it shifted the proverbial paradigm just as the Model T did in the early 20th century.

Carmakers of all sizes are now scrambling to bring all-electric vehicles to market – all while the infrastructure to power them remains off the pace. Hopefully, Tesla’s Superchargers will light a fire under carmakers, politicians, city planners and transportation departments to get chargers in place to fuel the growing number of electric cars. Once the charging network hits critical mass – which is when EV owners can essentially drive anywhere and charge up quickly – electric car ownership numbers will carve heavily into those of gas-powered cars.

Eventually, it will be goodbye gasoline, at least for personal cars.”

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“It Is Made To Be Contingent, Changing With Every Download And Update”

September 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love the Internet and the information it brings me, but I’m not on Facebook or Twitter and I don’t have a smartphone, so I’ve obviously said “no” to certain things. But will the things I’ve said “yes” be the same tomorrow? Will they be quietly remade by updating, constant updating? From “When Tech Turns Nouns Into Verbs,” Quentin Hardy’s New York Times blog post about a world in which the tools you use to measure also measure you, where things, simply put, change:

“We’re remaking the world so quickly that our language is breaking down.

Think about the phone you carry. You talk with people on it, but you can also open apps and transform it into a camera or chess board. As much as you talk on it, you use its Internet browser. In total daily usage, your phone is mostly pinging cellphone towers and Wi-Fi antennas, informing phone service providers, digital map makers and retailers of where you are.

Whatever this object is, it isn’t a phone in any conventional sense. And that may be a clue to a whole new way of thinking about the world around us.

The phone is a little connected computer — a device whose uses and meaning we continually explore and modify. It is by no means a phone in the historical sense. It is still a physical object, of course, but it is really a vehicle for one or another software-enabled experience. In an important sense, it is made to be contingent, changing with every download and update. That focus on the needs-driven experience means it behaves less like a static noun and more like an active verb.

This is becoming a commonplace across our connected world.”

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“The Company Also Wants To Prove…That The Auto-Drive Function Is Safe: Not Perfect, Not Crash-Proof, But Safer Than A Competent Human Driver”

September 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even this early in the game, autonomous vehicles are probably as safe or safer than ones driven by humans. But the question is this: How much safer can they be? From Adam Fisher’s long-form PopSci look at Google’s fleet in beat mode:

“Right now, Chauffeur is undergoing what’s known in Silicon Valley as a closed beta test. In the language particular to Google, the researchers are ‘dogfooding’ the car—driving to work each morning in the same way that [Anthony] Levandowski does. It’s not so much a perk as it is a product test. Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience. The company also wants to prove—in a statistical, actuarial sense—that the auto-drive function is safe: not perfect, not crash-proof, but safer than a competent human driver. ‘We have a saying here at Google,’ says Levandowski. ‘In God we trust—all others must bring data.’

Currently, the data reveal that so-called release versions of Chauffeur will, on average, travel 36,000 miles before making a mistake severe enough to require driver intervention. A mistake doesn’t mean a crash—it just means that Chauffeur misinterprets what it sees. For example, it might mistake a parked truck for a small building or a mailbox for a child standing by the side of the road. It’s scary, but it’s not the same thing as an accident.

The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second. Glitches occur about every 300 miles. This spring, Chris Urmson, the director of Google’s self-driving-car project, told a government audience in Washington, D.C., that the vast majority of those are nothing to worry about. ‘We’ve set the bar incredibly low,’ he says. For the errors worrisome enough to require human hands back on the wheel, Google’s crew of young testers have been trained in extreme driving techniques—including emergency braking, high-speed lane changes, and preventing and maneuvering through uncontrolled slides—just in case.

The best way to execute that robot- to-human hand-off remains an open question. How many seconds of warning should Chauffeur provide before giving back the controls? The driver would need a bit of time to gather situational awareness, to put down that coffee or phone, and refocus. ‘It could be 20 seconds; it could be 10 seconds,’ suggests Levandowski. The actual number, he says, will be ‘based on user studies and facts, as opposed to, ‘We couldn’t get it working and therefore decided to put a one-second [hand-off] time out there.’

So far, Chauffeur has a clean driving record. There has been only one reported accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google. A self-driving car near Google’s headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward and impact another two cars, falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago—the Stone Age, in the foreshortened timelines of software development—and, according to Google spokespeople, the car was not in self-driving mode at the time, so the accident wasn’t Chauffeur’s fault. It was due to ordinary human error.

Human drivers get into an accident of one sort or another an average of once every 500,000 miles in the U.S. Accidents that cause injuries are even rarer, occurring about once every 1.3 million miles. And a fatality? Every 90 million miles. Considering that the Google self-driving program has already clocked half a million miles, the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.”

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Junot Diaz Recommends Short-Story Collections

September 23, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In his Ask Me Anything at Reddit, writer Junot Diaz was asked to recommend short-story collections. Here’s the exchange:

“Question:

What are some short story collections you’d recommend to those people who are averse to reading short stories? Ones that would definitely change their mind about the genre.

Junot Diaz:

TE HOLT In the Valley of the Kings dennis johnson’s Jesus’ Son maxine hong kingston (memoir) Woman Warrior Edward P Jones Lost in the CIty Sandra Cisneros Woman Hollering Creek Sherman Alexie Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Octavia Butler’s BloodChild and Other Stories Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life.

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“What Is ‘Hot,’ Statistically?”

September 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

The idea of the “hot hand” in sports has long been derided as an antique of a more narrative-driven era, but could analytics have rescued the decidedly non-sabremetric idea from the dustbin? Perhaps. Some researchers now believe that basketball players who are shooting well see their percentage improve, if slightly, over a progression of shots. Still seems fishy to me. From “Biting the Hot Hand,” by Zach Lowe at Grantland:

“The same implication issue arises when we consider work by Jeremy Arkes, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, who found over a giant sample size that players are about 3 percent more likely to hit their second free throw on a two-shot trip to the line if they also hit the first one. That’s fascinating, if it holds over multiple seasons. But how do coaches and players adjust to that kind of information?

Incorporating all this research is easier during timeouts, when a coach can design plays to minimize the chances of a bad heat check, as Henry Abbott has written before at TrueHoop.

Believing or not believing in the hot hand might change some things about the way a game flows, but even proponents of the hot hand’s existence claim it’s a relatively small effect that doesn’t emerge very often. And that’s part of the challenge in the data, even apart from trying to explain the factors that might lead a player into a better rhythm on a particular day. What is ‘hot,’ statistically? Making two in three shots? Eight in 12? How do we know when to start the streak and when to stop it? How many times do players really get ‘hot’ in a given season? Five? Ten? Two?

‘It’s very hard to define,’ Ezekowitz says.”•

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“Reggie Miller with a clutch trey”:

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