Excerpts

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“As Much As Any Nation-State, We Now Also Belong To Corporate Sovereigns”

July 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I set up a Facebook account once a couple years ago so that I could have a look around the site and see if I thought it was worth it. I didn’t think it was. In addition to allowing someone as dubious as Mark Zuckerberg to be controlling my Internet experience–owning it, really–I didn’t like the artifice of how people represented themselves. And I thought that maybe the past should be past. Maybe every day shouldn’t be a high school reunion and reconnecting to an earlier time shouldn’t be so easy. Maybe when destroying chronology is easier, progress is more difficult.

From “The New Too Big To Fail,” a Medium essay by Feroz Salam about a corporation that is often thought to be something more noble:

“More so than we ever did with the banks, we’ve bought into the myth of the gentle technology giants. There’s a long history of (sometimes unjustified) mistrust in finance, built on hundreds of years of its waxing and waning influence on world affairs. The technology companies are newer and friendlier entities, run by young ‘nerds’ who seem less threatening and more involved in apolitical technical engineering. In ‘Zuck’ we trust.

The eternal reality, of course, is that apoliticism is a myth. Google, Facebook et al. have increasingly had to grapple with social and political issues as the need to stay ethical come up against growth expectations. Google decided that it was OK to censor search results in China for a slice of the pie, and Facebook has had to frame a dubious ‘code of morals’ as to what’s permitted on its pages and what’s not. The entire lot of them have been press-ganged into providing on-demand personal data to the American government. In the interests of market share, Zuck, Sergei, and the rest of their merry crew have shown a cynical willingness to push their users under any bus that’s good for business.

As much as any nation-state, we now also belong to corporate sovereigns: Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Google. Unfortunately, we have little say in how they are run and ultimately, our own naive enthusiasm is to blame for placing so much of our information where we have no control over it. What’s worse is how completely we have bought into a system where we abide by the arbitrary morals of our new technocratic overlords.

As with the financial crisis, we have to admit our old model of privacy is broken.”

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“Reich, Harper’s Had Decided, Was The Leader Of A ‘New Cult Of Sex And Anarchy'”

July 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Wilhelm Reich, part-time cloudbuster and the likely inspiration for Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron, is the rich subject of a historical piece at Vice by Jason Louv. The opening:

“It was the greatest incidence of scientific persecution in American history.

In July of 1947, Dr. Wilhelm Reich—a brilliant but controversial psychoanalyst who had once been Freud’s most promising student, who had enraged the Nazis and the Stalinists as well as the psychoanalytic, medical, and scientific communities, who had survived two World Wars and fled to New York—was dying in a prison cell in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, accused by the government of being a medical fraud engaged in a ‘sex racket.’

That ‘racket’ would one day be called the ‘sexual revolution.’ But it was still 1947 in America—an America not even ready for psychoanalysis, still a nascent science that Harper’s and the New Republic had categorized, right alongside Reich’s theories, as being no better than astrology. (Reich, Harper’s had decided, was the leader of a ‘new cult of sex and anarchy.’)

If the American public wasn’t ready for Dr. Freud, then how much less prepared would they be for Dr. Reich—a man who, at his Orgonon institute near Rangely, Maine, was researching the energetic force of the orgasm itself?

Reich had taken Freud’s theories far. Too far, according to the FDA. Starting with Freud’s connection of sexual repression to neurosis, Reich had theorized that it was the physical inability to surrender to orgasm that underlay neurosis, and eventually turned people to fascism and authoritarianism. Reich migrated from Freud’s simple talking cure to what he called character analysis, a therapy designed to help his patients overcome the physical and respiratory blocks that prevented them from experiencing pleasure. Finally—and most dangerously—he claimed that the orgasm was an expression of orgone, the joy-filled force of life itself. With phone-booth-size devices called ‘orgone accumulators’ he could harness this force to cure neurosis, disease, and even affect the weather and help crops grow.”

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“She Disliked The House’s Clutter And Wished That Her Husband Had Not Kept Their Dead Cat Frozen In Their Refrigerator”

July 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A solitary man in Poughkeepsie dies of natural causes at the end of 2012, and the mystery of his wife’s disappearance from 30 years earlier is suddenly, startlingly solved. From Vivian Yee’s amazing New York Times article:

“The Nicholses’ house was like no other in the neighborhood. Ms. Nichols loved books, and nearly every room was filled with volumes from floor to ceiling. Mr. Nichols collected cameras, guns and books about the Civil War. Neighbors marveled at the tools and gadgets he had amassed through his job at I.B.M. and his evening shifts in the Sears hardware department, including six lawn mowers.

In their yard were parked two Amphicars, novelty vehicles that could drive on land and in water, of which only about 3,800 were ever produced. At a time when computers were still relatively unknown in regular homes, the Nicholses had several, lined up in a room off the living room where Mr. Nichols also kept a police and fire scanner running at all times.

‘They were a married couple,’ Ms. Darragh, now 62, said. ‘She was normal. He was not.’

Only to a next-door neighbor and close co-workers did Ms. Nichols hint that her husband’s oddities bothered her, too. She told Mary Jo Santagate, a teachers’ aide at her school, that she disliked the house’s clutter and wished that her husband had not kept their dead cat frozen in their refrigerator: she dreaded opening it to cook. She complained of having to hand her paycheck over to him each week.

When the couple’s only son, 25-year-old James Nichols III, drowned in 1982 after falling off the hood of one of the Amphicars in a Mississippi lake, she told Ms. Darragh she was upset that her husband had parked the same Amphicar in the driveway, a daily reminder of her grief.

‘Knowing her, she tolerated it because she didn’t have the wherewithal to tell him to knock it off or I’m going to leave,’ Ms. Santagate said.”

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“The Huffington Post Played A Large Role In McCarthy Having A Platform To Disseminate Her Fearmongering”

July 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You know how sometimes when a dictator comes to power, the previous leader of the nation is “disappeared” from sight, not just physically but even airbrushed from photos? Not only can people be scrubbed from history but so can truth.

If you look at the front page of the Huffington Post right now, you’ll see a headline that reads:”The View Makes Extremely Controversial Choice,” which refers you to a story by Katherine Fung about Jenny McCarthy being hired as a new talking head for Barbara Walters’ show. The brief piece contains the following sentence:

“McCarthy has guest hosted the show eight times. Her appointment, though, is not without criticism about her controversial views on vaccinations and autism.”

What the story unfortunately doesn’t mention is that the Huffington Post played a large role in McCarthy having a platform to disseminate her fearmongering. In fact, there was a time when McCarthy was all but the de facto medical writer for the site, using bad science and no science to repeatedly frighten parents from immunizing their children. When the main research she was using for her theories was proved to be falsified bunk, the Huffington Post even allowed McCarthy a rationalization of an exit story which she didn’t deserve.

I’m not accusing Fung of purposely omitting this vital fact. She’s probably a very young person who hasn’t been working for the Huffington Post for long and likely has no idea about the link. But there must be management people who have institutional memory and should not allow the publication a divorce of convenience from the facts. Similarly, the second link, which takes you to a story at Salon about McCarthy’s past, doesn’t mention the HuffPo role in the debacle. I’m not saying Salon purposely elided the connection because of what seems to be a working relationship between the two sites, but it is reason to pause. (Scroll down to the bottom of that very Salon page and you’ll see all manner of Huffington Post editorial links.) Salon did at one time call out the Huffington Post on such things.

I’m not someone who hates Arianna Huffington. I think she’s basically a good person. But she and her management team made a terrible mistake in allowing McCarthy to publish her pseudo-science and the Huffington Post shouldn’t “forget” its role in that sad campaign.•

“We Have Exhausted The Human Potential”

July 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

When performance-enhancing drugs are used every day by the average person–and that will happen–it won’t be possible to hold athletes accountable anymore. A section from a provocative post by Julian Savulescu at Practical Ethics which was inspired by runner Tyson Gay’s recent failed drug tests

“We reached the limits of human performance in sprinting about 20 years ago. To keep improving, to keep beating records, to continue to train at the peak of fitness, to recover from the injury that training inflicts, we need enhanced physiology. Spectators want faster times and broken records, so do athletes. We have exhausted the human potential.

Is it wrong to aim for zero tolerance and performances which are within natural human limits? No, but it is not enforceable.

The strongest argument against doping is safety. The harm inflicted on East German athletes must never be repeated. But anything is dangerous if taken to excess. Water will kill you if you drink enough. As sport has shown over last 20 years, performance enhancers can be administered safely. They could be administered yet more safely if it was brought out into the open.

Of course there is no such thing as risk-free sport. But we need a balance between safety, enforceability, and spectacle. Elite sport itself is fundamentally unsafe, as Team Sky’s Edvald Boassen Hagen and Geraint Thomas, both nursing fractures from recent cycling crashes can tell you. It was entirely appropriate to enforce the wearing of helmets to limit the safety risks. But it would be inappropriate to limit the race to only straight, wide roads, or to remove downhill racing or to take any number of other measures that would increase safety but ruin the sport as a spectacle and as a cultural practice. It would be a waste of time to take other measures, such as limiting the amount of time or the speed that riders can train at, even on the grounds of safety. It could not be enforced.

Enforceability requires a reasonable limits.“

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“What Is Wrong With This Story?”

July 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Culturalism, Gladwell and Airplane Crashes,” an Ask a Korean! essay which pushes back in general at the idea of blaming plane crashes on the ethnicity of the pilot and specifically on Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas on the topic:

“Gladwell’s Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes goes like this: in landing an airplane, especially in tough circumstances (such as bad weather, older aircraft, etc.,) communication within the piloting crew is critically important. When signs of danger appear, at least one of the two or three pilots in the cockpit must spot such signs and alert the others. Certain cultures, however, have characteristics within them that make such communication more difficult. For example, some culture expects greater deference to authority than others. This leads to a situation in which a lower-ranking pilot hesitates to communicate the danger signs to the higher ranking pilot. Some culture employs a manner of speech that is indirect and suggestive, rather than direct and imperative. This leads to a situation in which one pilot merely suggests the danger signs to another pilot, when a more urgent approach may be necessary.

Gladwell uses the 1997 Korean Air crash to illustrate this point. In 1997, Korean Air Line Flight 801, a Boeing 747 jet, crash-landed Guam, killing 225 of the 254 on board. The accident occurred because, in a bad weather, the captain relied on a malfunctioning equipment to assess the plane’s position, and believed the airplane was closer to the airport than it actually was. As the plane was approaching the ground, six seconds before the impact, the first officer and the flight engineer noticed first that the airport was not in sight. Both called for the captain to raise up the plane again, and the captain did attempt to do so. But it was too late: Flight 801 rammed into a hill, three miles before it reached the airport.

How did Korean culture figure into this situation? Gladwell first notes that in Korean culture, there is a respect for hierarchy. Gladwell also notes that Korean manner of speaking is indirect and suggestive, requiring the listener to be engaged and applying proper context to understand the true meaning. This is particularly so when a lower-ranked person addresses the higher-ranked person: to express deference, the lower-ranked person speaks indirectly rather than directly.

According to Gladwell, Flight 801’s first officer and flight engineer noticed a problem long before six seconds prior to the crash. Gladwell claims that more than 25 minutes before the crash, the first officer and the flight engineer noticed the danger signs and attempted to communicate to the captain–indirectly. But because the captain was tired, he was not properly engaged to understand the true intent of what the first officer and the flight engineer said. Gladwell claims that the first officer and the flight engineer finally spoke up directly with six seconds to go before the crash, and still did not do enough to challenge the captain. As Gladwell puts it, “in the crash investigation, it was determined that if [the first officer] had seized control of the plane in that moment [six seconds before the crash], there would have been enough time to pull the nose and clear Nimitz Hill.”

What is wrong with this story?” (Thanks All Things D.)

Samuel Reshevsky, Outwitting His Elders (1920)

July 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

“His face is intelligent and his head well shaped, but not abnormal.”

In the classic photograph above, the eventual chess grandmaster (and accountant) Samuel Reshevsky shows his prodigious skills for the game by squaring off simultaneously against 20 excellent adult players in France. The following article from the May 18, 1920 New York Times records the day’s events:

“Paris–Twenty graybeards sitting in a square played chess yesterday in Paris against a very small boy 8 years old, and he beat them all. Among the graybeards were some of the best  players in France, and one at least, whose boast is that he drew with Capablanca, the Pan-American chess champion, but all their reputation availed them nothing against a frail child with a pale, thoughtful face, who moved quietly from one board to another, reducing their most skillful plans and wiles to nothingness and mating them when they least expected it. 

Samuel Rzeschewski is the name of the prodigy. He was born near Lodz, in his father, himself a well known player, showed him the moves. For the paternal dignity the lesson was unfortunate. Within a fortnight Samuel was giving his father such beatings that to equalize things he had to give him a rook and another piece.

Yesterday at the Pavillon de la Rotonde, against twenty of the best players of the Palais Royal Society, his victory was complete. Wearing a blue sailor suit, he stood alone in the square of tables and faced unperturbed his graybeard and bald antagonists. His face is intelligent and his head well shaped, but not abnormal. Only the gravity of his face showed that he was not any ordinary 8-year-old going to play ‘hunt the thimble’ with an assembly of grandfathers.

Stepping quickly from one board to another, he spent little time on his moves. He seemed to see at once the weakness of his opponents’ play. Once or twice, when one of them had moved foolishly, his brows contracted in a disapproving frown. For half a minute at most he stood in front of each board, whistling through his teeth, then moved decisively and left his opponent puzzling uselessly how to counter the attack. In the end every one of the men was soundly trounced.

From here Samuel is going to London to complete his conquest of Europe, and then his father says he must retire from public life and begin his education, which has been sadly neglected during the war.”

Samuel Reshevsky, in 1968.

Reshevsky, in 1968.

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“It’s Important That Stories Like Mine Aren’t Used To Say That Everything Is O.K. For Blacks”

July 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of the first New York Times article about Barack Obama, in 1990, when he became the initial African-American president of the Harvard Law Review:

“The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.

‘The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,’ Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ‘It’s encouraging.

‘But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,’ he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment.”

“You Have A Bag Of Bits That You Saved For A Thousand Years, But You Don’t Know What They Mean”

July 14, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love books so much, but when was the last time I stepped inside of a library? I can’t even remember. From a piece by Paul Sawers at the Next Web in which Internet pioneer Vint Cerf thinks about the future of libraries:

“As with the newspaper industry, Google has had an immeasurable impact on how people access information. Indeed, most petty arguments are settled in seconds now thanks to smartphones and search engines.

When asked what he saw as the ‘future’ of libraries, he expressed deep concern about the way information will be stored and passed through generations. Books, if looked after, can be passed down through many generations – but the rate at which technology is evolving leads to some concerns about so-called bit-rot.

‘You have no idea how eager I am to ensure that the notion of library does not disappear – it’s too important. But the thing is, it’s going to have to curate an extremely broad range of materials, and increasingly digital content,’ says Cerf.

‘I am really worried right now, about the possibility of saving ‘bits’ but losing their meaning and ending up with bit-rot,’ he continues. ‘This means, you have  a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what they mean, because the software that was needed to interpret them is no longer available, or it’s no longer executable, or you just don’t have a platform that will run it. This is a serious, serious problem and we have to solve that.'”

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“Increasingly, The Workers Are Invisible”

July 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Andrew Leonard’s new Salon article about the Digital Age’s emergent servant class:

“Fancy Hands — ‘Do What You Love — We’ll Do The Rest’ — is just one entrant in a growing cohort of companies that are outsourcing all kinds of humdrum work to the ‘cloud.’ The biggest names — Task Rabbit and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — have offered similar services for years. The market niche seems sure to boom further, propelled by a generation completely comfortable with turning to the smartphone as the first place to look for work.

The best cloud labor start-ups have received plenty of laudatory press coverage and rave reviews from users. In the specific case of Fancy Hands, one can instinctively understand the appeal. Who wouldn’t want their own executive assistant on hand 24/7 to deal with the drudgery that clogs up daily life. You know you would love to ‘automate all the boring parts of your life.’ Fancy Hands democratizes access to what previously was only available to the very well off.

That’s progress — for the consumer of the service. But one thing you discover when reading reviews of these services is that the vast majority of commentary focuses primarily on the users. Far less discussion is devoted to the producers, to the phenomenon of a new and growing class of drudges — the peons now making your phone calls and conducting your Google searches and washing your cars and toilets. These are not your father’s jobs. The typical Task Rabbit or Fancy Hands employee is invariably an independent contractor eligible for no benefits, quite often working for rates well below minimum wage, and able to exert zero leverage to resist employer abuse.

There are no paid holidays, no sick days and no health benefits in this new ‘distributed workforce.’ There are no unions in the world of ‘cloud labor,’ a class of worker that fits neatly into what some academics have dubbed the ‘precariat.’ Nor is it hard to understand why coverage of services like Fancy Hands rarely considers such things as working conditions, because, increasingly, the workers are invisible. They’re just another computer process working behind the scenes, albeit powered by coffee, rather than electricity.

Is this the future of work?”

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“One Of The Greatest Instruments Of Social Change–The Greatest, I Would Say, Since The Printing Press”

July 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I know there were some early home-video recorders that failed to gain traction, but a 1970 Lillian Ross New Yorker piece (subscription required) profiles what appears to be the very first system, Cartrivision, which also offered the initial video-rental service, long before Netflix or even Blockbuster. An excerpt from her conversation with Cartrivison executive Samuel Gelfman, who realized way back then what a disruptive technology he was working with:

“What is Cartrivision?’ we asked.

“One of the greatest instruments of social change–the greatest, I would say, since the printing press,” Mr. Gelfman said. “Our set is a color-television set, but it’s also a cartridge-television. Whit this set, you can have your own cartridge library. You slip a cartridge in the slot, press the button, and watch up to two hours of your own choice of movie. A great football game. Anything you want. What’s more, we’ve built in an off-the-air recorder to pick up shows when you’re not at home. It doubles as a camera with a portable microphone. You can make your movies and have instant replay. We’ll sell you the set for between eight and nine hundred dollars. Our cartridges–blank ones–from nine-ninety-eight for a fifteen-minute tape to twenty-four ninety-eight for a two-hour tape. The movie cartridges we’ll rent. Three dollars for overnight. What’s important is for the first time we’re going to be able to provide what you want to see. You don’t have to worry about sponsors anymore.”•

 ______________________

Here’s a What’s My Line? episode in which the system is demonstrated by company spokesperson Art Rosenblatt in 1972, the year it came to the market and the one before it was pulled.

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“Regulation Will Never Keep Up With The Speed Of Technological Innovation”

July 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From an NPR report on David Brin, who predicted something like Google Glass long before there was a Google:

“‘What’s going to happen in the next 10 years is disruptions and disappointments that will cause people to be tempted to legislate against these things,’ Brin says. ‘The first impulse has to do with privacy.’ But, he says, regulation will never keep up with the speed of technological innovation, so by the time Google Glass gets regulated, Glass-type technology will be built into contact lenses, or into even more conspicuous devices.

So Brin says if wearable technology will allow for some segment of society, say, government, to ‘spy,’ then all of us should want and have the same technology available. Society, he says, should refrain from bans on Glass and similar technology so that everyone has a way to peer at everyone else, making the background knowledge we have of one another the normal rules of human engagement.

Brin wrote in 1988, ‘The world had a choice. Let governments control surveillance tech … and therefore give a snooping monopoly to the rich and powerful … or let everybody have it. Let everyone snoop on everyone else, including snooping the government!'”

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“Consumerism Began Its 150-Year Journey From Real Farmers’ Markets In Small Towns To Fake Farmers’ Markets Inside Metropolitan Grocery Stores”

July 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “The American Cloud,” Venkatesh Rao’s broad yet provocative Aeon essay which traces what he feels is the artifice of modern U.S. life–with costs cleverly hidden–not only to A&P founder George Gilman but all the way back to Alexander Hamilton: 

“Every time you set foot in a Whole Foods store, you are stepping into one of the most carefully designed consumer experiences on the planet. Produce is stacked into black bins in order to accentuate its colour and freshness. Sale items peek out from custom-made crates, distressed to look as though they’ve just fallen off a farmer’s truck. Every detail in the store, from the font on a sign to a countertop’s wood finish, is designed to make you feel like you’re in a country market. Most of us take these faux-bucolic flourishes for granted, but shopping wasn’t always this way.

George Gilman’s early A&P stores are the spiritual ancestors of the Whole Foods experience. If you were a native of small-town America in the 1860s, walking into one of Gilman’s A&P stores was a serious culture shock. You would have stared agog at gaslit signage, advertising, tea in branded packages, and a cashier’s station shaped like a Chinese pagoda. You would have been forced to wrap your head around the idea of mail-order purchases.

Before Gilman, pre-industrial consumption was largely the unscripted consequence of localised, small-scale patterns of production. With the advent of A&P stores, consumerism began its 150-year journey from real farmers’ markets in small towns to fake farmers’ markets inside metropolitan grocery stores. Through the course of that journey, retailing would discover its natural psychological purpose: transforming the output of industrial-scale production into the human-scale experience we call shopping.

Gilman anticipated, by some 30 years, the fundamental contours of industrial-age selling. Both the high-end faux-naturalism of Whole Foods and the budget industrial starkness of Costco have their origins in the original A&P retail experience. The modern system of retail pioneered by Gilman — distant large-scale production facilities coupled with local human-scale consumption environments — was the first piece of what I’ve come to think of as the ‘American cloud’: the vast industrial back end of our lives that we access via a theatre of manufactured experiences. If distant tea and coffee plantations were the first modern clouds, A&P stores and mail-order catalogues were the first browsers and apps.”

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“George Orwell Thought Paperbacks Were Of So Much Better Value Than Hardbacks That They Spelled The Ruination Of Publishing”

July 11, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a New York Times article by David Streitfeld, a reminder that paperback books, now endangered by digital books, were once themselves considered a disruptive technology:

“Penguin and Random House were innovators who made paperbacks into a disruptive force in the 1940s and ’50s. They were the Amazons of their era, making the traditional book business deeply uneasy. No less an authority than George Orwell thought paperbacks were of so much better value than hardbacks that they spelled the ruination of publishing and bookselling. ‘The cheaper books become,’ he wrote, ‘the less money is spent on books.’ Orwell was wrong, but the same arguments are being made against Amazon and e-books today. Amazon executives are not much for public debate, but they argue that all this disruption will ultimately give more money to more authors and make more books more widely available to more people at cheaper prices, and who could argue with any of that? This was not a prospect that many on Wednesday were putting much faith in.”

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“Two-Thirds Of Democrats, Or 67%, Said They Believe Mr. Spitzer…Should Be Given A Second Chance”

July 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The futility of old media in our decentralized age can’t be better demonstrated than when New York City tabloids decide to attack a politician they don’t like and define an election–and no one cares. That’s been the case with Eliot Spitzer, who’s been excoriated by the New York Daily News and New York Post in the days since reentering politics, yet has been received fairly well by the electorate. He’s been torn down much more viciously than Anthony Weiner since the latter jumped into the Mayoral race, probably because Spitzer actually had sex during his sex scandal. From the Wall Street Journal:

“Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer leads Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer by nine percentage points in the race for New York City comptroller, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC 4 New York-Marist poll.

Michael Howard Saul reports on former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s rise in the polls in the race for New York City Comptroller before Spitzer is even officially on the ballot. 

Among registered Democrats, including those who are undecided but leaning toward a candidate, Mr. Spitzer outpaces Mr. Stringer 42% to 33% in the Democratic primary, the poll showed. Nearly a quarter of voters were undecided, but two-thirds of Democrats, or 67%, said they believe Mr. Spitzer, who resigned as governor five years ago after he was caught patronizing prostitutes, should be given a second chance.”

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“I Kind Of Am A Fictional Character”

July 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Taking a quick break from creeping out Siri, John Malkovich was being–who else?–John Malkovich during an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

_______________________

Question:

What is the worst script you have ever read? 

John Malkovich:

i was given a script in france, by a seemingly rather disturbed young man. let’s just say it was not good. also, one night, a woman came in to our yard in france around 2:00 am. i was outside on the phone talking to my producing partners in los angeles. she gave me a script called elle tue (she kills!) which was about the lead character killing a movie star. it was written like it had been done with a butcher knife in red ink. also, it wasn’t very good.

_______________________ 

Question: 

What are your thoughts on space travel? Would you like to go into space?

John Malkovich:

yes, i suppose i would. but don’t you have to go to the bathroom in your space suit and everything? i’m just not sure i could do that.

_______________________

Question: 

Have you spoken Bernard Madoff since 2008? What would you like to say to him if you had the chance?

John Malkovich:

no, i only met mr. madoff once, many years ago. he seemed very pleasant. but, you know, i don’t think i’d have much to impart. for me, in all honesty, it was a good life lesson. and it also must be said that the vast majority of in the world live with nothing and with the hope of nothing their entire lives. i was lucky, as i’ve been my entire life. i could go back to work and make my way in the world.

_______________________

Question:

Stanislavski or Brecht?

John Malkovich:

brecht. he was a miserable human being, but quite smart about theatre.

_______________________

 Question:

Hi John. Say I were to see you in public, would you rather I, or anyone for that matter, pretend I didn’t know who you are or would you rather have a conversation (without a camera shoved at you of course)?

John Malkovich:

normally quite happy to have a conversation. or to be completely ignored.

_______________________

Question:

I once had a friend who, after watching Being John Malkovich, was thoroughly convinced you were a fictional character. I don’t really have a question, just wanted to share! Thanks for all of your amazing work; I am a big fan. 

John Malkovich:

i kind of am a fictional character….•

I'm urinating right now.

I’m urinating right now.

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“Robots Can Produce Far More For Far Less”

July 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s understandable when people fret about jobs disappearing permanently into the steady hum of automation, but no one should ever think that the robotization of our culture can be halted. We shouldn’t look at it as a simple matter of choice any more that we could have chosen to stick with the horse and carriage rather than opting for the internal combustion engine. Choosing the better technology is human nature even when it hurts humans. (Or perhaps just hurts us in the short term.) From “The Wastefulness of Automation,” an interesting article by Frances Coppola at Pieria which worries about the future:

“What if capitalists DON’T want a large labour supply? What if automation means that what capitalists really want is a very small, highly skilled workforce to control the robots that do all the work? What if paying people enough to live on simply is not cost-effective compared to the running costs of robots?  In short, what if the costs of automated production fall to virtually zero? 

I don’t think I am dreaming this. I’ve noted previously that forcing down labour costs is one of the ways in which firms avoid the up-front costs of automation. But as automation becomes cheaper, and the efficiency gains from automation become larger, we may reach a situation where employing the majority of people at wages on which they can afford to live simply is not worthwhile. Robots can produce far more for far less. 

This creates an interesting problem. The efficiency gains from automating production tend to create an abundance of products, which forces down prices. This sounds like a good thing: if goods and services are cheap and abundant, people can have whatever they want, can’t they? Well, not if they are unemployed and have no unearned income.  It is all too easy to foresee a nightmare future in which people who have been supplanted by robots scratch out a living from subsistence farming on motorway verges (all other land being farmed by robots), while lorries carrying products they cannot afford to buy flash past on the way to the stores that only those lucky enough to have jobs frequent. 

But it wouldn’t actually be like that.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The Huge Losses And The Huge Noise On The Nook Side Are Masking A Very Interesting Business On The Retail Side”

July 10, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You know that when I write that I’m less than sanguine about the chances of Barnes & Noble or any brick-and-mortar bookstore chain that I’m talking what I think is happening and not what I wish were happening, right? There are great advantages to e-readers, but I would love to see physical stores thrive. I just don’t see how that occurs. But not everybody is as dour as I am. From Julie Bosman in the New York Times:

“John Tinker, an analyst for the Maxim Group, said the retail stores were still an attractive property, something that had been obscured by missteps from the digital division. Mr. Lynch, who came to Barnes & Noble with a background in technology and e-commerce rather than book-selling, spent most of his time focused on the digital side of the company. Mr. Riggio has expressed support of the Nook business to employees, but has always devoted his energies to old-fashioned retail book-selling.

“The huge losses and the huge noise on the Nook side are masking a very interesting business on the retail side,’ Mr. Tinker said. ‘If there’s one thing that Riggio is good at, it’s running stores.'”

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“Noises Can Easily Fool Our Brains Into Thinking That We Have Won”

July 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve always wondered whether the music and sound effects which accompany the action in video games can control (to some extent) the quality of the player’s performance. Or if they can even encourage return playing. Do game manufacturers hire social scientists and neuroscientists to research such things? From Meeri Kim’s Washington Post article about slot machine sounds:

“Whether you’re in Las Vegas or the small-town casino down the street, slot machines sound more or less the same: jangly music, the whir of spinning reels accompanied by loud beeps and chimes.

A recent shows that some of those noises can easily fool our brains into thinking that we have won — even when we have unequivocally lost money.

‘The way slot machines are designed, sound is a really crucial component of player feedback,’ said lead author and behavioral neuroscientist Michael J. Dixon of the University of Waterloo in Ontario.Because the jubilant sound effects are always tied to wins or even partial losses — ‘losses disguised as wins,’ Dixon calls them — they act as positive reinforcement and can skew our perception of lost money.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)

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“The Number Of People Who Want To Buy Physical Books Is Plummeting”

July 9, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Remember earlier this year when I posted about Barnes & Noble announcing it would cut only a small percentage of its stores over the next decade, as if the chain were capable of controlling the sweep of history? Things continue to get stickier. From Matthew Yglesias at Slate:

“Obviously Michael Huseby isn’t going to save Barnes & Noble. Because Barnes & Noble is a very successful chain of bookstores, except the number of people who want to buy physical books is plummeting. A digital bookstore can stock a much larger inventory with almost no warehousing costs, and can deliver the book of your choice to you within seconds. What’s more, a Kindle Paperwhite or a iPad Mini is lighter than a book and yet can contain many books, greatly facilitating travel. Even better, you can highlight passages of your digital books and annotate them and then have all your annotations available to you on all your digital devices. The only real value of physical books at this point is a kind of nostalgia-soaked experience, and people want to experience that at a friendly independently owned bookstore not an impersonal chain.”

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“More Than 58,000 Believers Packed Into The Warsaw National Stadium To See Father John Bashobora, A Self-Proclaimed Exorcist”

July 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a Spiegel report about a Catholic exorcist packing a football stadium in Poland:

“While Pope Francis is trying to modernize the Catholic Church in Rome, priests in Poland organized a large event over the weekend that took on a somewhat atavistic tone.

More than 58,000 believers packed into the Warsaw National Stadium to see Father John Bashobora, a self-proclaimed exorcist, as he preached on Saturday. Known as a healer, the Ugandan priest drew a number of people in wheelchairs to the event, along with many others hoping to ease their pain.

Bashobora has a reputation as a ‘faith healer who has already driven the devil out of a number of people,’ one 54-year-old woman told news agency DPA. The woman, a recovering alcoholic, added that she hoped to be ‘permanently healed of this evil.'”

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“The Only Organizations Whose Tax-Exempt Statuses Were Actually Denied Were Progressive Ones”

July 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Our new technologies have enabled a neverending news cycle–more like a terminal sprint than a cycle, actually–that demands immediate response, that makes caution and patience seem like cowardice or obfuscation. The recent brouhaha about the IRS targeting Tea Party political groups was a scandal right before it was a non-story. That’s because no one waited for the facts. And conservative outlets and talking heads weren’t the only culprits–everyone caught the virus. The opening of Alex Seitz-Wald’s Salon piece on the topic:

“The first few days of the IRS scandal that would consume Washington for weeks went like this: Conservatives were indignant, the media was outraged, the president had to respond, his allies turned on him … and only then, the Treasury Department’s inspector general released the actual report that had sparked the whole controversy — in that order. It’s a fitting microcosm of the entire saga, which has gone from legacy-tarnishing catastrophe to historical footnote in the intervening six weeks, and a textbook example of how the scandal narrative can dominate Washington and cable news even when there is no actual scandal.

While the initial reports about the IRS targeting looked pretty bad, suggesting that agents singled out tax-exempt applications for Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the media badly bungled the controversy when supposedly sober journalists like Bob Woodward and Chuck Todd jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst from day one. Instead of doing more reporting to discover the true nature and context of the IRS targeting, or at least waiting for their colleagues to do some, the supposedly liberal mainstream press let their eagerness to show they could be just as tough on a Democratic White House as a Republican one get ahead of the facts. We expect politicians to stretch reality to fit a narrative, but the press should be better.

And they would have gotten away with it, too, had their narrative had the benefit of being true. But now, almost two months later, we know that in fact the IRS targeted lots of different kinds of groups, not just conservative ones; that the only organizations whose tax-exempt statuses were actually denied were progressive ones; that many of the targeted conservative groups legitimately crossed the line; that the IG’s report was limited to only Tea Party groups at congressional Republicans’request; and that the White House was in no way involved in the targeting and didn’t even know about it until shortly before the public did.”

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“Will Technology Add Or Cut Jobs In The Long Term?”

July 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

David Brancaccio, public radio and TV fixture and director of Fixing the Future, answered that nagging question about technology and jobs during an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. The exchange:

“Question:

Will technology add or cut jobs in the long term?

David Brancaccio:

In the long run, I have to believe it creates jobs, the good ones. Just visit an engineering school such as Carnegie Mellon. The students in the robotics lab are not lying awake at night worrying about employment (or so they told me.) However, experts tell me that technology is moving ahead much faster now and it is a period of great disruption that will cost jobs. Remember the industrial revolution: It destroyed something like 98 percent of agricultural jobs. The question is, net, is it a creator? And what policies do we need to be a part of the it?”

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“I’m Hopeful There Will Be Forgiveness”

July 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

At least I never texted pictures of my cock.

Remember when I suggested it would be interesting if Eliot Spitzer entered New York City’s lacklustre Mayoral race? Well, mothers lock up your daughters, because Spitzer is getting back into politics! Granted, he’s running for Comptroller, not Mayor, but it’s a start.

No, seriously, you really need to get your daughters out of harm’s way. This guy likes to choke hookers.

From the New York Times: “Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York five years ago amid a prostitution scandal, is re-entering political life, with a run for the citywide office of comptroller and a wager that voters are ready to look past his previous misconduct.

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, hoping that voters have forgiven him his previous misconduct, will run for the citywide office of comptroller.

In a telephone interview on Sunday night, Mr. Spitzer, 54, sounding restless after an unwelcome hiatus from government, said he had re-envisioned the often-overlooked office and yearned to resurrect the kind of aggressive role he played as New York State’s attorney general. He said that after consulting with his family and taking the temperature of the city’s electorate, he believed New Yorkers would be open to his candidacy. ‘I’m hopeful there will be forgiveness, I am asking for it,’ he said.”

No, that was me.

No, that was me.

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“That City Of The Future Could Have Narrower Streets”

July 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a Nick Bilton blog post at the New York Times, which wonders how urban spaces could be reimagined in a time of driverless cars:

“Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts. 

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.”

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