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“Many Of The Rules That Govern Human Relationships Apply Equally Well To Human-Robot Relations”

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

First you fall in love and then you get married. These rules of courtship apply also to robots. If they are made to sound like us and move like us, bots are more likely to be accepted by people. Of course, we don’t treat other humans so well, either, so perhaps silicone should shudder at our embrace. From “How Robots Can Trick You Into Loving Them,” Maggie Koerth-Baker’s New York Times Magazine piece about the beginnings of a modern romance:

“In the future, more robots will occupy that strange gray zone: doing not only jobs that humans can do but also jobs that require social grace. In the last decade, an interdisciplinary field of research called Human-Robot Interaction has arisen to study the factors that make robots work well with humans, and how humans view their robotic counterparts.

H.R.I. researchers have discovered some rather surprising things: a robot’s behavior can have a bigger impact on its relationship with humans than its design; many of the rules that govern human relationships apply equally well to human-robot relations; and people will read emotions and motivations into a robot’s behavior that far exceed the robot’s capabilities. As we employ those lessons to build robots that can be better caretakers, maids and emergency responders, we risk further blurring the (once unnecessary) line between tools and beings.

Provided with the right behavioral cues, humans will form relationships with just about anything — regardless of what it looks like. Even a stick can trigger our social promiscuity. In 2011, Ehud Sharlin, a computer scientist at the University of Calgary, ran an observational experiment to test this impulse to connect. His subjects sat alone in a room with a very simple ‘robot’: a long, balsa-wood rectangle attached to some gears, controlled by a joystick-wielding human who, hidden from view, ran it through a series of predetermined movements. Sharlin wanted to find out how much agency humans would attribute to a stick.

Some subjects tried to fight the stick, or talk it out of wanting to fight them. One woman panicked, complaining that the stick wouldn’t stop pointing at her. Some tried to dance with it. The study found that a vast majority assumed the stick had its own goals and internal thought proc­esses. They described the stick as bowing in greeting, searching for hidden items, even purring like a contented cat.”•

Milgram meets metal:

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“It’s True That The World Series Has Lost A Bit Of Luster”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

I know baseball fans are supposed to hate player agent Scott Boras because he’s greedy and forces the game to be about money and makes ticket prices go up, but I don’t feel that way because it’s hypocritical in addition to being plain wrong. Boras represents his clients in a professional manner, works to see that players do as well as the owners (as it should be) and has no effect on ticket prices, since those are determined by owner perception of what the market will bear. Only in baseball can a small group of rich, supposedly capitalist people (owners) use an anti-trust exemption to eliminate competition, continually ask for welfare (i.e., taxpayer money to build luxury-box lined stadiums which price out those taxpayers) and complain about someone (Boras) who just wants a free market. Or a freer one, at any rate.

For a few years, the agent has been pitching the MLB to switch to a neutral, warm-weather site for the first two games of the World Series, in an effort to stem the championship’s increasing regionalization. It’s certainly better than anything Bud Selig and his lieutenants have come up with. Boras’ thoughts are covered this week in Nick Cafardo’s Boston Globe column, a perplexing weekly baseball roundup that mixes intelligent reporting with stupefying close-mindedness. There are gems like this: “Andy Pettitte is a Hall of Famer. Period.” No, he isn’t. Exclamation point! But even if you disagree, we should be able to debate the matter without someone preempting it so he doesn’t have to defend his position.

Anyhow, I’ll post some of the better stuff from this week’s Cafardo column, which concerns Boras’ proposal, followed by my own idea along the same lines for a rehashed Wild Card playoff.

From Boras:

“For five years super agent Scott Boras has called for something that makes a lot of sense — having the first and/or second game of the World Series take place in a neutral setting. Set it up much like the MLB All-Star Game or the Super Bowl, thus creating a year’s worth of interest in an event that has become, in Boras’s opinion, ‘regionalized.’

If you had two games to start the World Series in a warm-weather climate and/or dome, you’d create quite a buzz. The prelude to the game or games, Boras suggests, would be a gala, followed by a big ceremony where the Cy Young, MVP, and other awards would be part of a TV special in the host city. He calls it, baseball’s Oscars.

All of this, in Boras’s view, would get the corporate world involved much like it is for the Super Bowl. …

‘It would be a gathering place for all of baseball,’ Boras said. ‘The team officials would have to show up for the awards and other business. It could be the start of the hot-stove season as it once was. It would bring baseball center stage. It would make the World Series an event, much like the All-Star Game, which is the best in sports. Why not take all of the metrics of that event and apply them to the World Series?’

It’s true that the World Series has lost a bit of luster.”•

My idea for Wild Card Weekend:

End the regular season on a Wednesday and leave two days for possible tie-breaking games and travel. Three days after the season ends is Wild Card Saturday (“One Saturday, Two Celebrations”). You choose a neutral, warm-weather or domed location and hold both the AL and NL Wild Cards on the same day on the same field. (If you want a home playoff game, you have to win.) There would be one early game and one late game with “halftime” entertainment. Reveal regular-season awards in a live televised event from the host city the night before the games are played. Have cities bid on Wild Card Saturday a couple years in advance. Because you are guaranteeing two victory celebrations on the same day, it should be an easy sale for TV.•

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“Perhaps We Should Demand An End To The Unimaginable Suffering Of Victims And Their Families”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I hate when some incorrigible wiseass makes a good point in a snide way and I’m not that incorrigible wiseass. It should have been me. Henry Porter of the Guardian suggests that gun violence in America has become a humanitarian crisis requiring international intervention, just like Syria with its chemical weapons. The opening of his article:

“Last week, Starbucks asked its American customers to please not bring their guns into the coffee shop. This is part of the company’s concern about customer safety and follows a ban in the summer on smoking within 25 feet of a coffee shop entrance and an earlier ruling about scalding hot coffee. After the celebrated Liebeck v McDonald’s case in 1994, involving a woman who suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, Starbucks complies with the Specialty Coffee Association of America‘s recommendation that drinks should be served at a maximum temperature of 82C.

Although it was brave of Howard Schultz, the company’s chief executive, to go even this far in a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.

That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC’s navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.”

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“It Sounded Like It Was Going To Be Something Like Another War On Drugs, A Very Amorphous Thing”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

From an interview posted at the Los Angeles Review of Books which Jon Wiener conducted with Joan Didion one week after September 11, 2001:

“Jon Wiener:

The news today is that President George W. Bush has just launched —

Joan Didion:

‘Operation Infinite Justice.’ Yes.

Jon Wiener:

You’ve always paid close attention to our political rhetoric. What do you make of ‘Operation Infinite Justice’?

Joan Didion:

At first it sounded like we were immediately going to be bombing someone. Then it sounded like it was going to be something like another war on drugs, a very amorphous thing with a heightened state of rhetoric and some threat to civil liberties.”•

For a real challenge, build King Kong on top of the Twin Towers”:

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Franz Reichelt, Pride Before The Fall (1912)

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“I am confident of success.”

Franz Reichelt was sure he was right. A tailor taken with aviation, Reichelt convinced himself in 1912 that his nouveau parachute would serve and protect. French authorities forbade his planned demonstration of the contraption with a leap from the Eiffel Tower unless a dummy was used in his stead. But Reichelt would not listen to reason: He became his own dummy. These two classic photos show him just prior to his fatal miscalculation played itself out in front of hundreds. From “Dies in Parachute From Eiffel Tower,” a New York Times article that misspells the surname of the man in decline:

“Paris–Franz Reichalt, an Austrian tailor, who had been experimenting with a new form of parachute, jumped to-day from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, 180 feet high, and fell to the ground like a stone. He was killed instantly. 

Reichalt had long been interested in aviation questions. Every spare hour he spent pursuing this hobby. He recently decided to compete for a prize offered for the best form of parachute or other device which would safeguard an aviator in the event of an accident happening to his machine.

Reichalt tried several designs for a parachute and experimented with them in the courtyard of the house he occupied. Apparently his experiments to some extent were successful. At all events for weeks past Reichalt had been petitioning the authorities to allow him to make a serious trial of as apparatus from the Eiffel Tower.

Such permissions were not easily obtained, and that which he finally got from the Prefecture stipulated that the test be made with a dummy. There was little secrecy about the fact, however, that Reichalt intended to substitute himself for the dummy in spite of 10 degrees of frost and a stiff northeaster.

Several hundred people gathered underneath the Eiffel Tower toward 8 o’clock when the experiment was to be made. Reichalt arrived with a friend carrying his parachute, which was made of khaki colored canvas, weighing about 20 pounds and had a surface of nearly 40 square yards.

Several aviation specialists were present, among them M. Hervieu, who made several experiments with the same kind of device himself, and it is significant that M. Hervieu, on examining Reichalt’s apparatus, expressed great doubt as to its practicability, advancing one or two technical arguments against it which Reichalt was quite unable to oppose.

But he was not shaken in his conviction even at the eleventh hour, for he said almost jauntily: ‘I am confident of success.’ Mr. Hervieu emphatically declared, on seeing a preliminary test from a distance that the parachute required much too long a time to open itself out. His judgement had hardly been made when it was most fully confirmed.

Reichelt clambered over the hand rail and threw himself forward, but the parachute never opened, and his descent was one of unbroken acceleration 180 feet to the ground. His body was a shapeless mass when the police picked it up and carried it with all speed in a taxicab to the nearest infirmary.

The accident caused a protest to be raised this evening against a repetition of such experiments except with the fullest approval and knowledge of specialists.“•

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“This Essay Starts With Utopia—The Utopia Known As The American University”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I root every day for alternatives (online or otherwise) to what America’s higher-education system has become: a fast-food meal with five-star prices, preparation for a fictional world that doesn’t exist, a lottery without a prize, a trick, a hoax, a Ponzi sheme. Nobody lays out the woes better than Thomas Frank did in his recent Baffler essay, “Academy Fight Song.” The opening:

“This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry.

The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.

It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know.

When we reach the end of high school, we approach the next life, the university life, in the manner of children writing letters to Santa. Oh, we promise to be so very good. We open our hearts to the beloved institution. We get good grades. We do our best on standardized tests. We earnestly list our first, second, third choices. We tell them what we want to be when we grow up. We confide our wishes. We stare at the stock photos of smiling students, we visit the campus, and we find, always, that it is so very beautiful.

And when that fat acceptance letter comes—oh, it is the greatest moment of personal vindication most of us have experienced. Our hard work has paid off. We have been chosen.

Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins.”

“I’m Personally Convinced That If It Were Not For Us, We Might Well Have President Romney”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Occupy Wall Street gave us a number–99%–that framed the last American Presidential election. The movement is pretty much an afterthought now to most observers, but its founding father, David Graeber, thinks it’s just getting started, mostly because the economic system is still broken, still on the brink. Drake Bennett of Businessweek just did a brief interview with Graeber. An excerpt:

“Question:

Were you disappointed that the Occupy Wall Street movement didn’t accomplish more? 

David Graeber:

I’m personally convinced that if it were not for us, we might well have President Romney. When Romney was planning his campaign, being a Wall Street financier, a 1 Percenter, he thought that was a good thing. That whole 47 percent thing that hurt him so much was something the right wing came up with in response to our 99 percent.

But in terms of changing the whole legislative political direction, I think that’s a lot to ask. We weren’t trying to push specific pieces of legislation. We were trying to create an environment where people could be heard. And I think we did that. We also tried to do something else, which was to create this culture of democracy in America, which really doesn’t have one. And that’s such a major task. The more fundamental the aims of a movement, the longer it’s going to take. We’re organizing in much more constrained and difficult circumstances these days, but it’s still going on. It’s just that people don’t report on it that much.”•

See also:

 

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“Every Species In The History Of Biology That Outgrows Its Resource Base Suffers A Population Crash”

September 22, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Alan Weisman’s 2007 thought-experiment, The World Without Us, isn’t just one of my favorite books of the past decade but one of my favorite books, period. His soon-to-be published follow-up, Countdown, concerns world population, which still is booming. We’ve heard before of population bombs that never detonated, but Weisman has run the numbers and is not pleased. From Kenneth R. Weiss’ Los Angles Times interview with the journalist:

“‘Our numbers have reached a point where we’ve essentially redefined the concept of original sin,’ Weisman writes. ‘From the instant we’re born, even the humblest among us compounds the world’s mounting problems by needing food, firewood, and a roof, for starters. Literally and figuratively, we’re all exhaling CO2 and pushing other species over the edge.’

The theme of the book focuses mostly on the ecological question, how many people can Earth support without capsizing? It’s not a new pursuit, of course. Scholars dating to Tertullian, in 2nd century Carthage, have written about a teeming population being ‘burdensome’ to the world.

Weisman sets out to define an ‘optimum population’ for a sustainable Earth, one that balances the overall human numbers with how much each person consumes. As far as per capita consumption is concerned, he proposes a European lifestyle as something that would be widely acceptable but not something as energy-intensive as living in the United States or as difficult as living in much of Africa and Asia.

He doesn’t specify an optimum target population, although he sketches some 20-year-old calculations by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and colleagues that set the number at 2 billion or so. Instead, Weisman argues that we should get on a path of reducing our numbers or suffer the fate of the profusion of deer on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon that starved to death in the 1920s.

‘Like Kaibab deer, every species in the history of biology that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash — a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species,’ Weisman writes. ‘…Inevitably –- and, we must hope, humanely and nonviolently — that means gradually bringing our numbers down. The alternative is letting nature –- the new nature we’ve inadvertently created in our own image –- do that for us.'”

“I Think It Is Perfectly Sensible To Trust The Russians”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Not everyone believes in the Tao of Steve, but Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ authorized biographer, feels, as many of us do, that Apple has limped along since its co-founder’s death, offering new iterations instead of innovations. In a Financial Times article about the state of Apple and other topics, the former Time Managing Editor also analyzes the tense situation in Syria, seeing an intersection of Russian and American interests. An excerpt:

“I was at a dinner in Manhattan a few weeks ago, just as the Syria issue was heating up, with one of my previous biography subjects, Henry Kissinger. He gave a dazzling analysis (I would call it ‘incredible’ except that it was, in fact, exceedingly credible) of how Russia would see its strategic interests, and predicted that Russia’s president would soon insert himself into the situation by calling for an international approach to the problem. So I was impressed but not surprised when Vladimir Putin did precisely that a week later.

On some of the TV shows I went on to talk about Steve Jobs, I was asked instead about Syria – and the question was usually about whether we could possibly trust the Russians. Most of the guests got worked into a lather, saying that Barack Obama was being horribly naive to trust them. But I think it is perfectly sensible to trust the Russians: we can trust them to do what they perceive to be in their own strategic interest.

Some of Russia’s strategic interests clash with ours: they want to protect their client state Syria and minimise US influence in the region (and yank America’s chain when possible). But to a great extent, Russia’s interests in this situation actually coincide with ours – at least for the moment. Russia fears as much as the US does the rise of radical Islam just south of its borders. It doesn’t want chemical weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists. And it would like to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power.

That last interest seems to conflict with ours, since the US has called for regime change. But the Russians believe that toppling Assad is not the best idea when that might lead to al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces taking over much of Syria and getting control of some of the chemical weapons. Thus it is in Russia’s interest to get Assad to surrender his chemical weapons, rather than summarily topple him. That might actually be in the west’s interests as well.”

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“Where Things Get Really Worrying Is The Potential For Wireless Attacks”

September 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My initial reaction when I heard about autonomous cars a few years back was that they sounded amazingly cool and would be much safer than vehicles guided by human drivers. My second thought was that a terrorist–or just a bored teen–would ultimately be able to make a few thousand vehicles turn left simultaneously when they should be turning right. From “The Rise of Car Hacking” by Jeremy Laird at the Independent:

“Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at security firm IOActive, aimed to increase awareness of car hackability by hooking up a Nintendo game-console controller to a US-market Ford Escape SUV.

They were able to accelerate, brake and steer as though they were playing a video game. Except this wasn’t a game. It was a very real two-tonne SUV and it had been comprehensively hacked. Miller and Valasek also wired into a Toyota Prius hybrid car using a laptop computer and took control of several safety-critical systems including the brakes.

If there is a good news angle to this, it’s that those exploits, along with the BMW thefts, all require physical access to cars. Where things get really worrying is the potential for wireless attacks. What if the bad guys could compromise your car as easily as they take over your laptop’s web browser? And do it from behind a computer screen hundreds or thousands of miles away?”

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“The Comic Book Has Seized The Format And Exploded”

September 20, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

So far 28,000 students have signed up for an online course on comic books and graphic novels to be taught by William Kuskin, English professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, which speaks to our shifting notions of education and literacy. A couple of exchanges from the teacher’s Ask Me Anything at Reddit.

________________________

Question:

Why do you think comic books and graphic novels are such a successful storytelling medium?

William Kuskin:

Great question. You know, my own feeling is that comics are like medieval manuscripts from the fifteenth century. They are best, best, best artform for the book. They are something to have and collect and sort of worship. As the internet has made books only one medium of many for communication, the comic book has seized the format and exploded. That said, a lot of the energy has to do with community. People need a community of the imagination. Comics provide the platform for that community.

________________________

Question:

Looking forward to the course. My question is about the collapse of higher education. I was in the phd program at UPenn’s English Department (had to drop out because of severe depression unrelated to that). Anyway, I spent what free time I had trying to organize grad employees (we had already suffered the fatal(?) blow of the NLRB’s decision deeming grad employees at private unis not actually employees, so our election results had been impounded and never counted). Anyway, I did a study of the school of arts and sciences, and more than 70% of the courses were taught by adjuncts. Any thoughts on the ‘casualization of academic labor’? Also, the year most of my cohort went on the job market, there were 3 tenure-track jobs in the entire country…

William Kuskin:

This is a major question. A major one, and a difficult one. You are not alone in your experience and your # of 70% is sad, but not inaccurate. I have to put my ‘chair of the department’ hat on now to answer this. I would say three things: 1. Higher Education has been in a process of change to adjunct labor for some time. This is a painful and unplanned process. 2. Nevertheless the mission of higher education–to educate, to ennoble, and to foster new research–remains the same. I do not believe that mission will go away. Ever. In terms of graduate education, the only wise thing is to try, but also set a time limit to how long you can afford to stay in. There is much to be gained from going to graduate school, taking lessons, and moving on.•

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“We Had A Bunch Of Fireworks, And I Got A Vial Of Ether”

September 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Who could be greater than Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress, the comedy team behind the Eric Andre Show on Adult Swim? No one. Back with a second season of the absurd anti-talk show, Andre spoke with Dave Schilling of Vice about the insane birthday parties he throws for himself every year in Los Angeles. The opening:

“Vice: 

I hope I’m not revealing too much, but your birthday parties are the stuff of legend for a certain segment of people here in LA. They go pretty much all day and all night. Why hold such a massive event every year?

Eric Andre:

You know, I don’t have any god, so I don’t have any holidays, so it’s my only time of the year to like, go all out. Just be fully self-indulgent.

Vice:

Was there a clown or something this year?

Eric Andre:

No, there was a camel, a horse, a goat, a bunny, a 300 pound stripper, two Santa Clauses, we had John K. who created Ren & Stimpy drawing caricatures. I think he left early, actually. We had a bunch of fireworks, and I got a vial of ether.

Vice:

Just one vial of ether? Did you not share?

Eric Andre:

No, you can get pretty far off one vial, since just huffing a little. It’s not like you’re chugging it. Don’t drink it.”

••••••••••

“When I’m sparring with my buddies Brad and the other boys…”:

 

“Those are some tasty-ass kids”:

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“Most Of The Firm’s Wildest Ideas Are Dreamed Up At Google X”

September 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Well, Time‘s cover story, Can Google Solve Death?, overpromises just a little, doesn’t it? I mean, Google hasn’t even been able to solve social media. The article doesn’t provide much insight into its ostensible premise, that with the launch of Calico, a life-extension outfit, Google aims to, yes, defeat mortality, through information-rich analysis. But the piece by Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman works because of its shadow premise.

The real story, not necessarily a new one but well-stated here, is that Google is a deeply strange company–which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not like Microsoft, which rode its primary product (software) to great wealth, occasionally dabbling (unsuccessfully) in sectors it had already lost (Slate for online content, Bing for search, Zune for digital-music players). Facebook seems to be much more like Microsoft in its mission purity, whereas Google wants to cut a broader path.

No, the template for the search giant is the golden age of Bell Labs. Of course, Google hasn’t had nearly the success yet that AT&T’s R&D lab did. But it only has to hit in a couple of areas (e.g., driverless-car software leading a fleet of autonomous taxis) to begin to diversify itself into a seemingly endless future. Ultimately, it’s own life is the one Google is really trying to extend. 

From the article (which is paywalled):

“Most of the firm’s wildest ideas are dreamed up at Google X, which functions something like Google’s fantastical subconscious. It’s a secretive research arm headquartered a three-minute ride from the main Googleplex on one of the company’s 1,000-plus brightly colored bikes. While Page tends to the entire business as CEO, Brin now devotes much of his attention to X, which he runs in partnership with scientist and entrepreneur Astro Teller. Teller’s title–just to underline the operation’s stratospheric aspirations–is ‘Captain of Moonshots.’ (Teller changed his name from Eric to Astro, a reference to the AstroTurf-like buzz cut he sported in high school.) Except for his long hair, beard and mustache, he’s a dead ringer for his paternal grandfather, physicist Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.

According to Teller, Google X’s moon shots have three things in common: a significant problem for the world that needs solving, a potential solution and the possibility of breakthrough technology making all the difference. (Making money comes later.) Even a proposed project that meets all these criteria probably won’t make the cut. ‘Sergey and I being pretty excited about it is a necessary but not sufficient condition,’ Teller explains. ‘Depending on what it is, it might require consulting experts, it might require building prototypes, sometimes even forming a temporary team to see where it goes and then saying to the team, ‘It is your goal to kill this idea as fast as possible.’’

Four big Google X efforts are public knowledge. There’s Google Glass, the augmented-reality spectacles that pack a camera and a tiny Web-connected screen you can peek at out of the corner of your right eye and control with your voice and gestures. Makani Power–a startup that the company invested in and then bought outright in May–puts energy-generating wind turbines on flying wings that are tethered to the ground but circle 1,000 ft. in the air. Project Loon aims to deliver Internet access to remote areas of the planet by beaming it wirelessly from 39-ft.-tall helium balloons hovering 12 miles in the sky. Though Calico is a Google X–style long shot, it will be a separate entity from Teller’s shop.

But if you had to pick a Google X moon shot with the most plausible chance of permanently reshaping the way we live, it would be the self-driving automobiles.”

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“They’re Proposing In Some States That Marriage Contracts Should Automatically Dissolve At Periods, Say, Of Ten Years”

September 20, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

One final interview excerpt from The Americans, the 1970 book by David Frost which also gave us the Jon Voight and Ralph Nader pieces. Here’s an exchange in which the TV host and the author and politician Clare Boothe Luce talk about the future of marriage in the U.S.:

David Frost:

Do you think marriage will change, Clare?

Clare Boothe Luce:

Oh, I think it’s changing very rapidly, yes. In some states in the Union now there are definite proposals that marriage should be contractual over a period of time, like any other human engagement. And they’re proposing in some states that marriage contracts should automatically dissolve at periods, say, of ten years, when the children presumably are grown.

I think that the reasons for this are, first and most importantly, that ours is now a very mobile world. And people move around very fast. The old traditions, all of them, religion, all the rest of them, seem to be collapsing. One out of every three marriages today ends in divorce. 

And there is a drive now to legalize that thing, so that there’ll be no more divorce trials, and no more struggles over alimony. Simply that people marry, and the union dissolves every ten years.

Now as a Catholic and a Christian, I deplore this. But this seems what is likely to happen. And another thing too, we’ve got to remember that the life span has been greatly lengthened, and that people now live to be eighty. Women outlive the men. In the old days, not a hundred years ago, you go into a New England graveyard and you’ll see on the gravestone, over and over again, ‘Here lies John Jones and his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, Jean, and his third wife, Kate. A man wore out three women, of course, that was before they conquered childbirth fever.

Now women outlive men, according to statistics, by five years. So any kind of Christian marriage, normal marriage, will probably last fifty years. And it’s highly debatable how many people there are in the world who aren’t sick to death of one another after twenty, no less fifty.•

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“An Autonomous Car Will Eventually Crash”

September 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In a short Atlantic article, Steven Levine explains why the major automakers are going to cede the race for autonomous cars to Tesla and Google. An excerpt:

“Versions of the technology itself are not new—in 1959, GM created a Cadillac Cyclone concept car (see photo above) with a radar-equipped hood. But the Cyclone was never produced, and Flores says that GM will wait for much better sensors based on radar and laser-based lidar. ‘It has to be bullet-proof because you are talking about people’s lives,’ he said. In Japan, Nissan says much the same.

What’s the problem here? Donald Hillebrand, director of transportation research at the US Argonne National Laboratory, cited America’s notorious litigiousness as the main reason why big carmakers are content to let upstarts such as Tesla and Google take the first step. An autonomous car will eventually crash, and it will not be immediately clear who should be sued.

‘They want someone to go and explore the legal landscape first. There needs to be some case law,’ Hillebrand said.”

••••••••••

“With no help from the driver”:

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“The USPS Actually Made A Real Effort At Tackling Email In The Late 1970s And Early 1980s”

September 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “The Postal Service’s 30-Year Relationship with Email,” Jimmy Daly’s Fedtech article about the USPS’s tortured history with the technology that ultimately undid it:

“The Post Office Flirted with Email in 1982

In our ‘History of Email in the Federal Government,’ we noted that the USPS actually made a real effort at tackling email in the late 1970s and early 1980s: ‘Known as E-COM, the program allowed users to send electronic mail to a post office branch. From there, it was printed and hand-delivered.’ The system was active from 1982 to 1985, but it faced hurdles from the beginning. The Justice Department was concerned that the E-COM program violated antitrust laws, leading potential customers to believe the service would be short lived. Federal laws prevented the USPS from subsidizing the cost of services with funds from other services, making the program too expensive to gain traction. In addition, there was a 200-message minimum on each transaction, and letters could be no longer than two pages.

The initiative was far from profitable. In 1985, the Cato Institute reported that ‘the service charged 26 [cents] a letter and lost $5.25 a letter.’ Still, the postal service knew that prices had to be low in order to compete. The Postal Rate Commission, a federal regulatory agency, refused to lower rates and effectively ‘priced E-COM out the market,’ according to the USPS. The OTA’s report suggested that the ‘communications marketplace will significantly affect USPS finances, service levels, and labor force requirements’ and that it would be ‘prudent for Congress and USPS to address these issues aggressively.’ Despite growing volume and evidence of the rise of electronic communication, the program was discontinued in 1985.”

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“Everyone Under One Roof Made People Nervous”

September 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hell is other people, sure, but we’re all we’ve got. In the New York Times, Elaine Louie revisits a 1994 story about Californians who decided to experiment with co-housing. An excerpt:

“In 1994, The New York Times reported on how those members, or ‘partners,’ as they called themselves, had settled into their first year of life as a community (“Retirement? For 11 Friends, It’s Off to Camp”). It was one of a number of such experiments, known as cohousing communities, that were springing up around the country at the time, based on a Danish model developed in the 1960s.

The original group of 11 included four married couples and three women, all in their 50s and 60s, each of whom agreed to pay a monthly fee for the mortgage, taxes and insurance on the 6,000-square-foot complex, as well as a small daily usage charge for utilities whenever they were in residence (food and phone bills were handled individually). Bedrooms and some bathrooms were private, but nearly everything else was shared, an arrangement that seemed feasible given the longstanding friendships of most of the members, who had started a cooperative nursery school for their children when they lived in Southern California in the 1960s. Still, there were three buildings in the complex (two that contained common areas and private apartments and one where residents could pursue their hobbies), because, as Ms. Hartman said in the 1994 article, ‘Everyone under one roof made people nervous.’

How did the experiment turn out? On the 20th anniversary, the consensus was generally positive.”

“What Came To Pass For Apple Analysis Was Actually The Psychoanalysis Of That Individual”

September 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At Forbes, Eric Jackson considers Apple in the post-Jobs era in conversation with analyst Horace Dediu, who smartly challenges how we’ve historically viewed the company. An excerpt:

Question:

Turning to Apple, where is it at right now as a company in this post-Steve Jobs period?

Horace Dediu:

Still too early to tell. They seem to be cooking a lot of things and the great experiment of whether a company can be Jobsian without Jobs is still going on. I have been trying to put together a picture of how it operates. It’s hard because that’s their biggest secret. It’s also a picture that few people have ever seen, even those who worked there a long time. The glimpses so far are tantalizing but there is so much we don’t know and thus can’t assess how robust it is. One thing that is clear to me is that there is no absorption by mainstream observers of what makes Apple tick. It’s hiding in plain sight because what it is isn’t anything anyone can recognize. Case in point is the functional and integrated dimensions. It’s the largest functional organization outside the US Army and more integrated than Henry Ford’s production system. Just describing it sounds medieval and it’s so far outside convention that it’s not something reasonable people are willing to believe actually exists.

Question:

Is Tim Cook the right CEO for the company at this time? 

Horace Dediu:

I hold the belief that he’s been CEO for much longer than it seems. Jobs was not a CEO in any traditional sense. He was head of product and culture and all-around micromanager. He left the operational side of the company to Cook who actually built it into a colossus. Think along the lines of the pairing of Howard Hughes and Frank William Gay. What people look for in Cook is the qualities that Jobs had but those qualities and duties are now dispersed among a large team. The question isn’t whether Cook can be the ‘Chief Magical Officer’ but rather whether the functional team that’s around Cook can do the things Jobs used to do. 

Look at it another way: I subscribe to the idea that any sufficiently large company is a _system_ and needs to be analyzed using a lost art called ‘Systems Analysis’. This is a complete review of all parts and the way they inter-relate. However, since for most of its life Apple was _personified_ as an individual, what came to pass for Apple analysis was actually the psychoanalysis of that individual. It makes for great journalism and best selling books. It’s also banal and with almost certainty wrong. The proof is in the vastness of complexity and number of people involved. Engineers tend to think about constraints and the constraints on companies are innumerable.•

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“I Have Been In Touch With Him Just A Little Bit By Email”

September 18, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Many feel that filmmaker Roman Polanski should be in prison for the rest of his life, although not everyone agrees. One of those who begs to differ is Samantha Geimer, who was just 13 years old in 1977 when the filmmaker drugged and raped her. Now middle-aged and more bitter with the justice system than Polanski, Geimer has published a new book about the ordeal and actually has something of a correspondence these days with her victimizer. From an interview with Geimer in the Guardian:

“In 2009, after the release of Marina Zenovich’s documentary on the trial, Polanski sent Geimer an email apologising. ‘I want you to know how sorry I am for having so affected your life,’ he wrote. It wasn’t an admission of guilt, exactly, but it was at least a softening of his customary flat denial of any wrong-doing. She didn’t reply, but since then they have been in touch sporadically. This seems extraordinary – both his apology and their continued contact – a subject that Geimer is reluctant to the point of coy about speaking of.

‘Over all these years, our attorneys have communicated. We’re not buddies. But, I mean, I have been in touch with him just a little bit by email. Just personal stuff, nothing worth talking about.’ She gives the impression she is protecting his privacy, and, one imagines, the fragile state of detente between them. Has she sent him the book? ‘No. I don’t know if he’ll read it. I don’t believe he’s seen it. He’s a busy person, so I’m not sure if it’s something that it’s important to him to get to.’ The tone of this – there is no mistaking it – is the deference that creeps into interactions with the famous. It is alive, even now.”

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“We Should Be Able To Do 90 Per Cent Of Miles Driven Within Three Years”

September 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Recent evidence suggested Tesla Motors was entering the autonomous-car sector, and now Elon Musk, with customary confidence, has confirmed these suspicions. From a Financial Times interview:

“Robot cars that can take over most of the driving from their human handlers will be ready for the road within three years, according to Elon Musk, the US electric cars and space entrepreneur whose bold predictions have come to embody an ambitious new era in tech industry thinking.

Tesla Motors, which startled traditional automotive giants such as General Motors and Renault-Nissan with its electric cars, is now joining the race to build cars that can drive themselves, Mr Musk, the chief executive, said.

The attempt to build a driverless car would see Tesla overtake Google, which three years ago fired the starting gun in this technological race but has since struggled to find a partner to build the cars.

It also marks the latest attempt by Mr Musk to gain a technological jump on the rest of the industry after his company’s luxury sedan, the Model S, became the first profitable electric vehicle this year.

‘We should be able to do 90 per cent of miles driven within three years,’ he said. Mr Musk would not reveal further details of Tesla’s autonomy project, but said it was ‘internal development’ rather than technology being supplied by another company. ‘It’s not speculation,’ he said.”

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“Donald Barthelme Was The Stephen Sondheim Of Haute Fiction”

September 18, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In addition to having a great suggested reading list, author Donald Barthelme, when everything was clicking, wasn’t just amazing but was also unique. The opening of an excellent 2008 James Wolcott Bookforum essay about Bartheleme at the time of the publication of the posthumous short-story collection, Flying to America:

“Donald Barthelme was the Stephen Sondheim of haute fiction—a dexterous assembler of witty, mordant, intricate devices that, once exploded, exposed the sawdust and stuffing of traditional forms. His stories weren’t finely rendered portrait studies in human behavior or autobiographical reveries à la Johns Updike and Cheever, but a row of boutiques showcasing his latest pranks, confections, gadgets, and Max Ernst/Monty Python–ish collages. Like Sondheim’s biting rhymes and contrapuntal duets, Barthelme’s parlor tricks and satiric ploys were accused early on of being cerebral, preeningly clever, hermetically sealed, and lacking in “heart”of supplying the clattering sound track to the cocktail party of the damned. Yet, like Sondheim, Barthelme was no simple Dr. Sardonicus, licensed cynic. His radiograms from the observation deck of his bemused detachment evidently touched depths and won converts, otherwise his work wouldn’t have inspired so many salvage operations intended to keep his name alive and his enterprise afloat. Mere smarty show-offs don’t garner this kind of affection from a younger breed of astronauts. Just as there always seems to be a Sondheim musical poised for Broadway revival (Company in 2006, Sunday in the Park with George right now), Barthelme’s bundle of greatest hits and obscure outtakes has been parceled out in a series of reprintings and repackagings since his death in 1989. He’s always poised on the verge of being majorly rediscovered without ever quite making it over the crest, despite the valiant huffing done on his behalf.”

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“That Article Includes The City Supervisor Calling The Race ‘Three Billionaires In A Tub'”

September 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

The 1980s was a particularly jingoistic and muscle-flexing time in America, and for awhile we were encouraged to care about our place among the world’s yacht racers. The original Tan Mom, Dennis Conner, who seemed to have nothing better to do with his time, led us to un-classy prominence. Larry Ellison, who has plenty of better things to do, is struggling to put us back there, if in a seemlier manner. From “The Peacock and the Raven,” Katie Baker’s Grantland article about Ellison’s embattled re-engineering of a race that is so important to so few:

“Asking a random San Franciscan about the America’s Cup is like asking a tea partyer about death panels. The former group can be reliably counted upon to mutter something about ‘a bunch of billionaires with their toys’ in the same way that the latter group is sure to unfurl their Don’t Tread on Me flags at the slightest provocation. That, and the name ‘Larry Ellison’ is pronounced with the same crazy-eyed venom as ‘NOBAMA.’

You can’t really blame them. They were suspicious a few years ago when they kept hearing wild promises being thrown around about revenues and hotel room projections and global melting pots and vague reassurances that taxpayers would be reimbursed by private donors. (According to estimates, the city of San Francisco remains about $4 million in the hole. Also, that article includes the city supervisor calling the race ‘3 billionaires in a tub.’ DRINK!) They were confused by the haphazard marketing around the city this summer, never knowing which races actually constituted the America’s Cup. They either live in the Marina, in which case any hubbub in the neighborhood is a hassle, or they don’t, in which case they probably brag about how they never go there.

They’ve seen one bit of bad news after another, like the fact that only three syndicates ultimately coordinated Cup challenges (as opposed to the ’14 teams, 16 teams’ Ellison envisioned) because they found the boats too dangerous and/or too costly, or that one of those three syndicates, Artemis Racing, disastrously capsized during a training run in May. It was the second AC72 capsize in seven months — Oracle had flipped in October — but with far graver consequences: Adored 36-year-old crew member and father of two young sons Andrew Simpson was killed.

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Ellison called Simpson’s death a ‘freak accident,’ but you could tell he was rattled.”

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“Significant Numbers Of Sportsmen And Women Are Born To Dope, And Get Away With It”

September 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Some athletes have genetic advantages and others arrange for chemical ones. And a certain amount may have both, according to a recent Mail Online article by Nick Harris which says that some competitors have natural masking agents that allow them to dope at will. The opening:

“Eight of the most explosively gifted sprinters in the world are settling into their blocks on the start line of the 100m final at a major championship. The tension is almost unbearable; the rewards for success are huge.

To the spectators in the stadium and millions of fans watching on TV around the world, it is a spectacle without equal in sport.

But what very few of them will even suspect is that it is statistically likely that at least one of those runners will have a genetic make-up allowing him to take performance-enhancing steroids for his entire career — and never fail a drug test.

Science fiction? Far from it.

Now imagine the starting blocks of a swimming final at a significant international event in Asia — the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon, South Korea, for example.

It is quite feasible that half of the athletes about to dive into the water — perhaps as many as six out of eight depending on whether they are Chinese, Japanese, Korean or from another background — also have bodies that naturally allow them to take drugs but not get caught.

Astonishing though it sounds, significant numbers of sportsmen and women are born to dope, and get away with it. The proportion ranges from around one in 10 of those with European ancestry to one in five with African heritage, and up to a staggering two-thirds of people in some Asian countries, notably Korea.

These shocking statistics, largely unknown to followers of sport, go part of the way to explaining the vast difference between the numbers of elite athletes who are taking banned performance-enhancing drugs and the numbers being caught.”

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“The Consumers Have A Voice, They Really Have A Part, If They Will Only Speak Up”

September 18, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ralph Nader was a bothersome man, and that was useful when Americans began being called “consumers” rather than “citizens.” He did a great deal of good, alerting his neighbors to all manner of corporate abuses, which were planned and executed according to a playbook. Nader pointed out that corporations, which were definitely not people, were hellbent on gypping us and endangering us in the name of profits, and it made him one of the most important Americans of his generation, a town crier for the advertising age.

Some worried that Nader would be corrupted by the power, but that never happened. His fall occurred for a strange yet simple reason: He told himself a lie, and he believed it. Perhaps he’d been working too long with black and white and not enough gray, but during his 2000 Presidential campaign, he began marketing the lie: That the two major American political parties were exactly alike and nothing would be different regardless of who was elected. Some “consumers” bought in. And when you look back on it, you know that Al Gore wouldn’t have been precisely the same President as George W. Bush, that he likely wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, which cost us 5,000 Americans and maybe 100,000 Iraqis. It was Nader who helped remove those people’s safety belts. It’s a shame for them and their families, and for all of us as well, because we really could use a Ralph Nader right about now.

• • • • •

I’ve made it clear before that I don’t believe children should be admitted to fast-food restaurants any more than they’re allowed to patronize bars or purchase cigarettes. Ronald McDonald and the Wendy’s Girl are really no different than Joe Camel. They’re all there to lure a young demographic to addictive behaviors, disease and death.

From the 1970 David Frost book, The Americans, a passage in which the host and Nader engage in a discussion on children’s food:

“David Frost:

One of your main worries at the moment is baby food, isn’t it?

Ralph Nader:

Yes. Here’s an illustration. The leading companies in the industry are putting monosodium glutamate in baby food. That’s to enhance the flavor, so to speak. They’re putting in salt and sugar. But for whose taste? For the benefit of the mother, because the infant does not have taste discrimination. But if the mother likes the taste she will purchase the product and feed it to the infant.

It just so happens that not only do these ingredients cost more, but they have no nutritional value. And they may be potentially harmful, particularly to infants who have hypertension tendencies, as they develop later in life. And they don’t need them at all.

Do you know how easy it would be to have these baby-food manufacturers delete these ingredients from baby food? All it would take would be about three or four thousand letters from mothers around the country saying in no uncertain terms that they do want to purchase baby food on the basis of how nutritious it is for the infant. And it could change.

The consumers have a voice, they really have a part, if they will only speak up. You’ve got to develop a consumer power organized around things like the food industry, automobiles, insurance, telephone services, all these other industries, in order to develop the voice of the consumer.

David Frost:

You’ve said consumer power. As the years have gone by, you’ve been proved right, again and again. But you’ve also got more and more power yourself. Power to influence, at least. Doe sit ever worry you that power will corrupt you in any way?

Ralph Nader:

No. Because it doesn’t amount to a whit. It just amount to talking. You tell people that frankfurters are filled with fat up to thirty-five or forty percent; you tell them that their appliances are wearing out; tell them that their cars are coming out with more average defects–thirty-two per car in tested cars by Consumer Reports last year. You tell them that–

David Frost:

Thirty-two defects per car?

Ralph Nader:

Thirty-two defects per car. You tell them that there are illegal interest charges all over the country, being charged, and they’re concerned. But they don’t do much about it. They’re pretty complacent. They just sit an watch television.” 

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“There Still Exists A Solid Base Of Highly Solvent Readers That Will Pay A Premium For The Print Product”

September 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jonathan Franzen does not heart Jeff Bezos, but in a Guardian article, French digital-media maven Fréderic Filloux offers the Amazon honcho advice for the business side of the Washington Post. The opening:

“The questions stated above might not fall into Jeff Bezos’s areas of sharpest expertise. But there is no shortage of smart people within the Washington Post— at least a core group eager to seize their new owner’s ‘keep experimenting’ motto and run with it.

What can he do? For today, let’s focus on editorial products.

#1. The printed newspaper. Should the Washington Post dump its print product altogether? The short answer is no. At least not yet and not completely. Scores of digital zealots, usually with a razor-thin media culture, will push for the ultimate sacrifice. But in every market — Washington, London, Paris — there still exists a solid base of highly solvent readers that will pay a premium for the print product. This very group carries two precious features for newspaper economics: One, they are willing to pay almost any price to have their precious paper delivered every day. For a proof of that statement, see how quality papers repeatedly hiked prices in recent years, $2 or €2 is no longer a psychological threshold. Hefty street prices helped many to offset the decline of advertising revenues. Keeping the printing presses running offers a second advantage, the ads themselves: They gave lost ground, but the remaining print ads still bring 10 or 15 times more money per reader than digital versions — which is, let’s be honest, a complete economic failure of digital news products.

How long will it last? I’d say around five years.”

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