Excerpts

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“Right Now The U.S. Is The Only Nation That Operates Drones On A Large Scale, But That Will Change”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Drones will be used in the U.S. to deliver goods and aid police, but someday soon we might not be worried about a plane flying into a tower but instead a bird–wait, that is a bird, right? From a really good Time article by Lev Grossman about drones proliferating in the private sector:

“Drones are learning to think for themselves. Those University of Pennsylvania drones are already semiautonomous: you can toss a hoop in the air and they’ll plot a trajectory and fly right through it. (Whether or not you count Google’s self-driving cars as people-carrying, highway-borne drones seems like a question of semantics.) They’re also gaining endurance. In June, Boeing tested a liquid-hydrogen-powered drone called the Phantom Eye that’s designed to cruise at 65,000 ft. for four days at a time. Boeing’s Solar Eagle, which has a 400-ft. wingspan, is scheduled for testing in 2014. Its flights will last for five years.

This technology will inevitably flow from the military sphere into the civilian, and it’s very hard to say what the consequences will be, except that they’ll be unexpected. Drones will carry pizzas across towns and drugs across borders. They’ll spot criminals on the run and naked celebrities in their homes. They’ll get cheaper to buy and easier to use. What will the country look like when anybody with $50 and an iPhone can run a surveillance drone? Last fall the law schools at Stanford and NYU issued a report, ‘Life Under Drones,’ which was based on 130 interviews with Pakistanis. It makes for unsettling reading. ‘Drones are always on my mind,’ said a man from Islamabad. ‘It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them. You know they are there.’

Right now the U.S. is the only nation that operates drones on a large scale, but that will change: flying drones is hard, but it’s not that hard. Singer estimates that there are 76 other countries either developing drones or shopping for them; both Hizballah and Hamas have flown drones already. In November, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 17 years for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with remote-controlled planes. (The drone equivalent of the Newtown, Conn., atrocity is simply beyond contemplation.) The moral ambiguity of covert drone strikes will clarify itself very quickly if another country claims the right under international law to strike its enemies in the U.S. There may come a day when the U.S. bitterly regrets the precedents it has set.”

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“Easy Answers Like ‘Skills Training’ Won’t Necessarily Help Much”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological innovation leads to great wealth for a few but the struggle with creative disruption can last for most people for decades–until, at long last, hopefully, prosperity arrives. But until then–wow–painful! From a new Business Insider interview with Paul Krugman about the rise of the machines:  

“Whereas from about 1980 to 2000, the discussion about inequality was mostly seen as labor vs. labor (high-paid, high-skilled workers vs low-paid, low-skilled workers) the new story is about labor vs. capital a topic that is more taboo.

[Krugman] notes that there have been periods before where workers went several decades without reaping the benefits of capital-favoring technologies (the industrial revolution), and it’s possible that we’re in a period like that now, which unfortunately means that easy answers like ‘skills training’ won’t necessarily help much.’

As for the specific technologies that he’s intrigued by right now, he mentioned driverless cars and speech recognition, both of which use ‘big data’ to accomplish something that we previously thought required human intelligence.”

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“The Manuscript Was Tucked Away In A Safe-Deposit Box In A Bank In California”

February 3, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Truman Capote’s final, uncompleted novel, Answered Prayers, the one that was excerpted in Esquire in the 1970s and destroyed his social life, was never published in full. No one is totally sure where the hundreds of pages reside, but it’s believed they’re languishing in an unknown California bank security-deposit box, waiting to be found. At least that’s the theory put forth in Sam Kashner’s recent Vanity Fair piece, “Capote’s Swan Dive“:

“After Capote’s death, on August 25, 1984, just a month shy of his 60th birthday, Alan Schwartz (his lawyer and literary executor), Gerald Clarke (his friend and biographer), and Joe Fox (his Random House editor) searched for the manuscript of the unfinished novel. Random House wanted to recoup something of the advances it had paid Truman—even if that involved publishing an incomplete manuscript. (In 1966, Truman and Random House had signed a contract for Answered Prayers for an advance of $25,000, with a delivery date of January 1, 1968. Three years later, they renegotiated to a three-book contract for an advance of $750,000, with delivery by September 1973. The contract was amended three more times, with a final agreement of $1 million for delivery by March 1, 1981. That deadline passed like all the others with no manuscript being delivered.)

Following Capote’s death, Schwartz, Clarke, and Fox searched Truman’s apartment, on the 22nd floor of the U.N. Plaza, with its panoramic view of Manhattan and the United Nations. It had been bought by Truman in 1965 for $62,000 with his royalties from In Cold Blood. (A friend, the set designer Oliver Smith, noted that the U.N. Plaza building was ‘glamorous, the place to live in Manhattan’ in the 1960s.) The three men looked among the stacks of art and fashion books in Capote’s cluttered Victorian sitting room and pored over his bookshelf, which contained various translations and editions of his works. They poked among the Tiffany lamps, his collection of paperweights (including the white rose paperweight given to him by Colette in 1948), and the dying geraniums that lined one window (‘bachelor’s plants,’ as writer Edmund White described them). They looked through drawers and closets and desks, avoiding the three taxidermic snakes Truman kept in the apartment, one of them, a cobra, rearing to strike.

The men scoured the guest bedroom, at the end of the hallway—a tiny, peach-colored room with a daybed, a desk, a phone, and lavender taffeta curtains. Then they descended 15 floors to the former maid’s studio, where Truman had often written by hand on yellow legal pads.

‘We found nothing,’ Schwartz told Vanity Fair. Joanne Carson claims that Truman had confided to her that the manuscript was tucked away in a safe-deposit box in a bank in California—maybe Wells Fargo—and that he had handed her a key to it the morning before his death. But he declined to tell her which bank held the box. ‘The novel will be found when it wants to be found,’ he told her cryptically.”

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“There Was A Lot Of Film Around”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Bill Gates grew up in Seattle near an early computer center and Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley. Would they have chosen different paths in life if they were raised in Idaho or Kansas? How much does the place where we’re raised have to do with who we become? How much of it is chance and how much of it is hardwired?

David Fincher spent his formative years in the shadow of Northern California filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and believes that explains to a good extent why he’s a filmmaker. From a really good Financial Times piece about Fincher by Matthew Garrahan:

“Though Fincher’s childhood experience of Rear Window convinced him that he wanted to work in Hollywood, there was already plenty of film-making taking place around him in Marin County. He grew up in a middle-class family but their neighbors were some of Hollywood’s biggest names. ‘George Lucas was my neighbor, Francis Coppola was shooting The Godfather [nearby] in Shady Lane. There was a lot of film around.’

Lucas, who had not yet made Star Wars, was then embarking on his film career. ‘I was walking down the street one day with a friend of mine and saw a crew setting up lights for American Graffiti. We saw these old [Ford] Thunderbirds driving around. And then the movie came out. They found a part of a street in Petaluma that looked 10 years old and were able to transport an audience back in time with wardrobe, the hairstyles. To see that happen … was unbelievable.’ And fortunate, I say. Imagine if he had been raised in Idaho instead of Marin County. ‘I’d be a rancher. I’d be delivering calves now.’

When he was 14 his parents moved to Oregon but three years later the 17-year-old Fincher returned to California, where he stayed with a friend and his mother, and, unusually for a film director of his generation, did not attend film school. Within two years, however, he had found himself a job working for Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, where he was part of the crew that made Return of the Jedi.”

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“It Is Startling To Realize That Some Of Our Most Cherished Memories May Never Have Happened”

February 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Oliver Sacks’ new article in the New York Review of Books about memory distortion, a passage about Ronald Reagan “misremembering”:

“Daniel Schacter has written extensively on distortions of memory and the ‘source confusions’ that go with them, and in his book Searching for Memory recounts a well-known story about Ronald Reagan:

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot’s heroic response: ‘Never mind. We’ll ride it down together.’ The press soon realized that this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source.

215Reagan was a vigorous sixty-nine-year-old at the time, was to be president for eight years, and only developed unmistakable dementia in the 1990s. But he had been given to acting and make-believe throughout his life, and he had displayed a vein of romantic fantasy and histrionism since he was young. Reagan was not simulating emotion when he recounted this story—his story, his reality, as he believed it to be—and had he taken a lie detector test (functional brain imaging had not yet been invented at the time), there would have been none of the telltale reactions that go with conscious falsehood.

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.”

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“The New Research Seeks To Mine Web Data To Predict All Kinds Of Events”

February 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Marshall McLuhan wondered how the new environment would be programmed in the Digital Age, but here’s another important question: How will use our new access to predict the future? Researchers are currently studying decades of newspaper archives in an effort to protect us from dangers in the queue. From Gigaom:

“Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them.

The new research is the latest in a number of similar initiatives that seek to mine web data to predict all kinds of events. Recorded Future, for instance, analyzes news, blogs and social media to ‘help identify predictive signals’for a variety of industries, including financial services and defense. Researchers are also using Twitter and Google to track flu outbreaks.

Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky of the Technion-Israel Institute describe their work in a newly released paper, ‘Mining the Web to Predict Future Events‘ (PDF). For example, they examined the way that news about natural disasters like storms and droughts could be used to predict cholera outbreaks in Angola. Following those weather events, ‘alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance,’ they write.

Horvitz and Radinsky acknowledge that epidemiologists look at some of the same relationships, but ‘such studies are typically few in number, employ heuristic assessments, and are frequently retrospective analyses, rather than aimed at generating predictions for guiding near-term action.’”

Upton Sinclair, Pumping Oil! (1927)

January 31, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just read Chip Brown’s New York Times Magazine piece about the boomtown that North Dakota has become thanks to its massive oil reserves in this post-peak age, which reminded of this classic photograph of Upton Sinclair selling bowdlerized copies (the so-called fig-leaf edition) of his novel Oil! on a street in Boston, where the book was banned. (This novel is the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson’s great film There Will Be Blood.) The Beantown controversy helped boost Oil! to bestseller status. Sinclair, a radical firebrand, was no stranger to such public contretemps, whether running for the office of governor or hatching plans for a commune near the Palisades in New Jersey. On the latter topic, here’s a passage from a 1906 New York Times article about the formation that year of Sinclair’s techno-Socialist collective, Helicon Home Colony, which burned to the ground the year after its establishment:

“Not less than 300 persons answered Upton Sinclair’s call for a preliminary meeting at the Berkeley Lyceum last night of all those who are interested in a home colony to be organized for the purpose of applying machinery to domestic processes, and incidentally to solve the servant problem. The idea of the proposed colony is to syndicate the management of children and other home worries, such as laundering, gardening, and milking cows.

The response to Mr. Sinclair’s call gratified him immensely. When he went on the stage he was smiling almost ecstatically. The audience applauded him and then began to mop their faces, for the little Lyceum was almost filled, and some one had to shut the front doors.

The audience was made up almost equally of men and women. A large proportion seemed to be of foreign birth. Many of them were Socialists, judging from their manifestations of sympathy for Socialistic doctrines. The mentioning of two newspapers which disapprove of Socialism on their editorial pages was hissed. Mr. Sinclair himself said that he had thought of asking a Socialist to act as temporary Chairman, but that his man had thought that two Socialists on the stage at the same time would frighten the more conservative members.

The meeting lasted about two hours. Mr. Sinclair, at various times, had the floor about an hour and a half. Now and then the arguments caused a high pitch for excitement, and more than once four people were trying to talk at the same time. In the end always, however, what Mr. Sinclair suggested was accepted, including the appointment of committees and other preliminaries of organization.

For Mr. Sinclair is certain that his home colony is to come about. He said in his introductions that he had about a dozen people who had agreed to go in with him, whether anybody else did or not. But last night’s meeting indicated, in Mr. Sinclair’s opinion, that a home colony of at least 100 families could easily be organized.”

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“The Antennas Can Be Painted Onto Any Surface”

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

From Wired‘s “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World,” a piece of Rachel Swaby’s entry about spray-able Wi-Fi:

“By 2020, wireless technology is expected to have a global impact of $4.5 trillion. But growth depends on our ability to scale up. We need access that matches the number of devices demanding it.

Readily available Wi-Fi could help fix that problem. Internet and phone companies are already starting to deploy small cells—essentially tiny mobile phone towers that serve Wi-Fi along with 4G—in densely populated areas. But those companies have little incentive to build out the massive infrastructure required to connect the rest of the world.

One company has come up with a uniquely audacious solution—a Wi-Fi antenna in a spray can. Chamtech Enterprises has developed a liquid filled with millions of nano-capacitors, which when sprayed on a surface can receive radio signals better than a standard metal rod. With a router, Chamtech’s antennas can communicate with a fiber network, receive signals from targeted satellites, and set up a daisy chain with nearby nodes, potentially creating a mesh network of low-cost, broadband Wi-Fi hot spots. Because the antennas can be painted onto any surface, there would be none of the NIMBY-ism that greets every new cell phone tower. If that’s not fantastic enough, try this: No more cursing AT&T.“

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“We do nano-antenna spray-on material”:

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“Architecture Against Drones Is Not Just A Science-Fiction Scenario”

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

From an interesting post at the Chapati Mystery blog which speculates on how to create a city with architecture that makes it impervious to drone strikes:

“The drone may conceive of itself – if it was armed with the ordinance of self-awareness – as a tool beyond architecture.In the end of the 1990’s society was able to get used to CCTV on street corners in stores and on the street. We were even able to accept the use of Tomahawk missiles, at least in Tom Clancy books. The strangeness of the United States treating its enemies this way, as though they were the New England colonies in a strange reuse of King Philip’s lexicography, was brushed off in the excitement over new uses of adaptable technology. However, security cameras and fly-by-wire missiles still were part of a world that defined itself with concrete walls, cliffs-as-barriers,and other principles of formal architecture. Drones scoff at such conventionalities.

Drones’ ability to move through extraordinarily varied environments for extraordinarily long periods of time is of course unparalleled. They can scoff at conventional architecture by waiting out the inhabitants (if the goal is to eliminate a single person or a small group) or to poke and prod at the space from infinite angles using any number of conventional or digital imaging systems. Or,alternatively, the drone operator has the opportunity to decide to simply blow the whole place up. Much of the publicized fear over the expansion of drone warfare and reconnaissance is not distress at the collateral damage in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere but rather the very real fear that we in the United States and United States-like environs have no native way to defend ourselves from them or their operators.

However, as those who depended on castle walls discovered against Ottoman artillery and as the finest horsemen discovered during trench warfare, no invincible force of arms stays that way for long. Architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative. Such creations are not needed for the John Connors but for the Abdurahman al-Awlakis. The successful check against the machines is not a daydream but an inevitability, and the quicker more creative solutions are proposed, the more likely such answers can be disseminated widely and kept from the patent-wielding hands of some offshore-utopian type. (Thanks Browser.)

“We Need More Armed Citizens In The Schools”

January 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

David Mamet has taken his right-wing apostasy to the hilt, arguing at the Daily Beast that we really, really need armed security guards in schools. The problem is, having spoken to many security guards over the years, I know lots of them would be violating parole if they carried firearms. This assertion seems particularly untrue: “The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so.” No, not really. Oh, and fuck Mitch and Murray! From “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm“:

“What possible purpose in declaring schools ‘gun-free zones’? Who bringing a gun, with evil intent, into a school would be deterred by the sign?

Ah, but perhaps one, legally carrying a gun, might bring it into the school.

Good.

We need more armed citizens in the schools.

Walk down Madison Avenue in New York. Many posh stores have, on view, or behind a two-way mirror, an armed guard. Walk into most any pawnshop, jewelry story, currency exchange, gold store in the country, and there will be an armed guard nearby. Why? As currency, jewelry, gold are precious. Who complains about the presence of these armed guards? And is this wealth more precious than our children?

Apparently it is: for the Left adduces arguments against armed presence in the school but not in the wristwatch stores.

Q. How many accidental shootings occurred last year in jewelry stores, or on any premises with armed security guards?

Why not then, for the love of God, have an armed presence in the schools? It could be done at the cost of a pistol (several hundred dollars), and a few hours of training (that’s all the security guards get). Why not offer teachers, administrators, custodians, a small extra stipend for completing a firearms-safety course and carrying a concealed weapon to school? The arguments to the contrary escape me.”

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“Some Of The Cats Need To Be Dead”

January 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A lot of people tell me that I remind them of a cat, and that is NOT a compliment. Cats are horrible and I’m apparently not much better. But they get away with it all because they’re so cute and furry.

Unfortunately, free-ranging domestic cats are among the biggest murderers on the planet, killing billions of birds and millions of mammals each year, seriously damaging biodiversity. Perhaps it would be a good idea if it was illegal to let house cats roam and hunt at will, but Hannah Waters at Scientific American has a suggestion that is more Swiftian, though not intended as satire: Let’s humanely kill many of the feline population. I’m pretty sure that it will never happen, though I am completely sure that I’m glad I’m not Hannah Walters. From the essay:

“The obvious answer then is that, if we value biodiversity and wildlife and can manage to overcome our predilection for cute cat faces over cute bird faces, cat populations should be controlled through humane killing, just like many other invasive species.

But the funny thing is that no one suggests that. In compulsively researching this blog post, I read many papers showing that trap-neuter-release doesn’t work, or studies showing that, in computer models, euthanasia reduces cat populations more effectively than trap-neuter-release. But then in their concluding paragraphs, after providing evidence that current methods aren’t working, the action steps proposed by the authors are: (1) all pets should be neutered and (2) owners should be be better educated so they don’t abandon their cats.

What??

Look, I’m as sentimental as the next person. (I cried for the entirety of Les Miserables.) I love my cat and she gives my life meaning. But I also can admit that the science is staring us in the face. We can’t bear to talk about euthanizing cats because they are so friggin’ cute–but, if we’re honest with ourselves, the best solution to this problem is to kill cats. Kill them, with their cute little faces, their soft fur and their snuggles. Some of the cats need to be dead.”

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“Sounds like a male marking its territory”:

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“Are Your Powers Strong Enough To Fight Spider-Man Yet?”

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

Are you a British man who’s been injecting himself with deadly snake venom for 20 years because you believe it has healthy, youth-preserving properties? No? Well, just such a person, Steve Ludwin, did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. And apart from the rotting leg and heart attack, he does look fairly good. He describes his exploits thusly:

“Despite a stint in intensive care after an overdose from three separate venoms, a suspected heart attack brought on by cobra venom and a temporarily rotting leg, nothing thus far has put me off my passion for studying this highly evolved reptilian saliva.” You know, A-Rod is gonna start doing this shit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Why?

Answer:

I started because I listened to a voice of inspiration that blasted into my head one cold night in Connecticut where I am from(20 mins from Newtown) I knew that night which venoms I was going to use and everything. I had a strong feeling that something good would come of it. Felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters or something.

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Question:

Have you ever tasted it? if so, what did it taste like?

Answer:

Hemotoxic venoms taste ok and sweetish but the neurotoxins taste vile and bitter. Go figure.

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Question:

What is your injection schedule like? You seem to have a pretty strong tremor in your video. Do you always have this, or just after injecting venom? If its constant, did it only start after you injected venom for the first time?

Answer:

I inject every couple weeks. Although sometimes there are periods of time where I “push it” and do it more regularly.

The shaking in the video I’ve had a lot of questions about, but in reality it was just that I was nervous. It was early in the morning, we had to have paramedics present and an ambulance team outside, in case anything went wrong, and I had two camera guys in the room with me… Oh and a big light so the room was lit up. None of which I’m used to when I’m doing this on my own!

Oh and a late night of partying the night before with my gf, Mary Jane, didn’t help. I shake when I am extremely nervous and I am also camera shy like Fred Flintstone. I never shake when I am alone and milking snakes. Everyone who thinks I have done neuro damage is wrong. I also was partying the night before.

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Question:

You had a ROTTING LEG and continued to do this?? Wtf. Did it stink?? 

Answer:

I had three of the most horrible decomposing stinkholes on my leg. It stank like death. Flies were coming to it.

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Question:

I read in an article that you don’t sterilize the venom before injecting it. Why don’t you sterilize it? And, do you have trouble walking with those enormous balls of yours?

Answer:

Yeah, I used to just use fresh raw venom until some herpetologist Dr. pointed the stupidity of that! I am now much more careful but still never had any real problems the old way. And my balls are not enormous by any means. Matter of fact I think all the venom has seriously shrunken them like raisins.

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Question:

Are your powers strong enough to fight Spider-Man yet?

Answer:

No, but hopefully Bear Grylls.•

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“If China Perfects A Driverless-Car System, It Could Export That System To The Rest Of The World”

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

shp

Will Americans give up their steering wheels any more readily than they’ll surrender their guns? It’s tough to say since both are about power, control and ego. From Chunka Mui’s new six-part series at Forbes’s hideously designed website about autonomous automobiles, a passage that offers three possible reasons why such driverless vehicles may reach critical mass sooner than later:

“I can think of three plausible scenarios that, based on the compelling societal benefits and business opportunities, might jumpstart adoption. 

1. Google Fiber Redux. Google is the most likely player to put hundreds or thousands of driverless cars on the road to prove their effectiveness and clear away short-term hurdles. Google has a tradition of having its employees use its prototype technologies, a practice known as ‘eating your own dog food.’ Given recently passed legislation in California legalizing driverless cars (with backup drivers), Google might deploy hundreds of Google cars to chauffeur Googlers around the state. Google could quickly log millions of miles and accumulate mountains of evidence on the safety and benefits of the car. (According to various news reports, the Google car has thus far been hit twice by other drivers and once caused a minor accident—while under the control of a human driver.) Google could then move to pilot the technology at a larger scale, perhaps in Las Vegas, because Nevada has also approved the car. Google could use its deep pockets to invest in the necessary infrastructure, take the liabilities issues off the table (by essentially self-insuring) and make the cars available in Nevada at competitive prices. Such an effort would mirror theGoogle Fiber strategy in Kansas City to demonstrate the viability of high-speed fiber networks to the home.

2. The China Card. Although there are too many imponderables and cross-industry conflicts to imagine that the U.S. federal government would get involved any time soon, one can imagine scenarios where more interventionist governments, like China’s, might intervene. China has greater incentives to adopt driverless cars because its rates of accidents and fatalities per 100,000 vehicles is more than twice that of the U.S., and its vehicle counts and total fatalities are growing rapidly. In addition, the Chinese government could be motivated to accelerate the adoption of driverless cars because of the trillions of dollars that it would save by building fewer and narrower roads, by eliminating traffic lights and street lights and by reducing fuel consumption. And then there is the competitive dimension. A driverless car initiative would fit into several of the seven strategic industries that the government is supporting. Chinese researchers have already made significant progress in the arena. And, of course, if China perfects a driverless-car system, it could export that system to the rest of the world.

3. The Big Venture Play. In this scenario, a startup steps into the market to launch a large-scale, shared, driverless transportation system. While this might appear to be the most outlandish of the three scenarios, the outline of the a profitable business case has already been developed. The business plan was designed by an impressive team led by Lawrence Burns, the director of the Program on Sustainability at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and former head of R&D at General Motors. The plan is based on expert technical and financial analysis and offers three sustainable market-entry strategies. For example, the team did a detailed analysis of Ann Arbor, MI, and concluded that a shared-driverless system could be fielded that offered customers about 90% savings compared with the cost of personal car ownership—while delivering better user experiences. Analysis of suburban areas and high-density urban centers, with Manhattan as the case study, also yielded significant savings potential and better service. Such dramatic results promise tremendous business opportunities for a ‘NewCo’:

This is an extraordinary opportunity to realize superior margins, especially for first movers. In cities like Ann Arbor, for example, NewCo could price its personal mobility service at $7 per day (providing customers with a service comparable to car ownership with better utilization of their time) and still earn $5 per day off each subscriber. In Ann Arbor alone, 100,000 residents (1/3 of Ann Arbor’s population) using the service could result in a profit of $500,000 a day. Today, 240 million Americans own a car as a means of realizing personal mobility benefits. If NewCo realizes just a 1 percent market share (2.4 million customers) in the United States alone, its annual profit could be on the order of $4 billion. NewCo’s Business Plan explains how this idea can be realized quickly, efficiently and with effective risk management.

There are of course many assumptions built into such plans, but my review leads me to believe that it is a robust platform for serious exploration of the Big Venture Play.”

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“I Chose To Learn About Computing By ‘Being’ A Computer”

January 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Decades before Google Glass, Steve Mann created his own augmented-reality goggles, becoming, likely, the world’s first cyborg. From “Eye Am a Camera,” his article from late last year in Time:

“My own engagement in this evolutionary process began way back in the last century in 1978. Thirty four years ago, I invented a ‘glass’ that caused the human eye itself to effectively become both an electronic camera and a television display. I used it to experiment with ways to help people see better, through ‘wearable computing’ in everyday life. I called this invention ‘Digital Eye Glass’ or ‘Eye Glass’ or ‘Glass Eye’ (people wearing it look like they have a glass eye) or just ‘Glass’ for short.

Back in 1978, computers were massive machines requiring large computer rooms. My high school had a computer. It processed stacks of paper cards and printed the results on paper in the next room.

But the personal computer revolution was just being born. My brother and I were the first in our school to have a home computer. And rather than have it sitting on a desk at home, I often wore it on my body, connected to various prototypes of my eye glass.

In some sense, I chose to learn about computing by ‘being’ a computer, and to learn about photography by ‘being’ a camera for more than 30 years. I call this ‘learn-by-being.’

As a teenager in the 1970s, I built a computer-mediated world of ‘augmediated reality.’ This was nothing like ‘virtual reality,’ which ignores the real world. Augmediated reality served to both augment and mediate my surroundings.

My ‘glass’ became so much a part of my everyday life that it became part of me — part of my mind and body. And it evolved from a cumbersome apparatus with some parts permanently attached (portions of its sensory network implanted beneath the skin) to something sleek and slender that slides on and off like ordinary eyeglass frames.”

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“The Actor Represents Himself To The Public Before The Camera, Rather Than Representing Someone Else”

January 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Bruce Nussbaum’s essay about Apple takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here’s a piece from it, which talks about the difference in acting on stage and on film, which I mostly don’t agree with except for its most basic premise:

“For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. ‘The film actor,’ wrote Pirandello, ‘feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence …. The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.’ This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film ‘the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible … ‘ In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw ‘the latest trend … in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and… inserted at the proper place.’ With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the ‘beautiful semblance’ which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.”

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“It Is The Charismatic Figure That People Identify With And Hope To Emulate”

January 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The most important thing for Apple’s future will be the first new product it produces post-Jobs that isn’t just an iteration of another one (e.g., shrinking the iPad). Even if Steve Jobs himself had the product in the pipeline, the way it’s executed and introduced will determine what Apple is going forward. But even if the company delivers, stock price won’t necessarily follow, because that isn’t always congruous with performance. The circus is still popular, but it isn’t the same without P.T. Barnum, minus his perfections and imperfections. From Bruce Nussbaum’s new Fast Company essay, “Why Apple Is Losing Its Aura“:

“Apple, of course, also gives us traditional physicality and aesthetics in the tactility of its products and the touch-screen mode of our communicating with them. For two decades or so, corporations shifted away from ‘things’ to ‘services’ and ‘thinking’ and ‘monetizing,’ but Apple stayed with making beautiful stuff that felt good in the hand. The ‘fit and finish,’ the glass and aluminum, the size and shape of its products added to the company’s Aura. Now Amazon (with its Kindle), Google (with its glasses), and others are following.

Finally, Aura is often associated with charisma. It is the charismatic figure that personifies and makes possible all the elements of Aura. It is the charismatic figure that people identify with and hope to emulate. They have high expectations for this leader but are forgiving of sins if they are acknowledged and changed. Jobs played that role, in close association with Ive and a small team of incredibly creative people who worked with him for many years.

This Aura, this combination of elements that beckon us to Apple and compel us to stay, is the generator of its economic value. This emotional engagement, not simply the number of iPhones sold worldwide, is the real value of the company. Looking at Apple’s value through the concept of aura allows us to move beyond the technology and the units sold to place the company’s economic value within a social context from which it is derived. If you don’t understand the auratic power of engagement, you can’t understand Apple or modern capitalism.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“His Argument Also Runs Counter To What I Have Been Saying In Congress”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The last time professional chucklehead Joe Scarborough used his flat-earth theory–if many people believe the round earth is flat, then the person who believes that the round Earth is round is a fool–he ended up being embarrassed by his scurrilous criticism of pollster Nate Silver. But some people never learn. He’s now lambasting New York Times economist Paul Krugman about deficit spending not because the MSNBC pundit has some sort knowledge or proof, but because, in Scarborough’s mind, Krugman’s reasoning “runs counter to conventional wisdom across the Western world.” Sooner or later, the “other people disagree with this guy” theory will work the way some shit eventually sticks to a wall. The opening of Scarborough’s new Politico column “Paul Krugman vs. the World“:

“Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman came on Morning Joe Monday to discuss his latest book and the state of affairs in Washington. Mr. Krugman’s view is that Americans would be better off if its government ran deeper deficits and ignored its longterm debt. That, of course, runs counter to conventional wisdom across the Western world, which is exactly why the New York Times columnist believes Spain and Great Britain are suffering through endless recessions.

His argument also runs counter to what I have been saying in Congress and in the media since 1994. So it would be no surprise that the guy who wrote this, and this, and this and this over the past week would take exception to Mr. Krugman’s words. But most of our viewers did not tune in to hear me talk over the Nobel Prize winner. They tuned in to hear Paul Krugman. So I did my best to give him space.”

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“The Word Is Then Projected In The Chosen Language”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Ivy Guide is a pen attachment that scans and translates text as you wand over it. From Mashable: “Learning a new language comes with its difficulties, but three designers are looking to put translations right at your fingertips.

The Ivy Guide, a device that fits over pens and pencils, scans words and projects its translation directly onto the document.

The scanner tip adjusts to any writing tool with a flexible sponge, and while pressing the translating button, readers can underline text. The word is then projected in the chosen language, and cleared by pressing again. The scanner connects to a USB for easy charging.”

“Would Research Subjects Simply Extinguish The Life Of A Machine Pleading For Its Life?”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

We treat each other like crap but would we be better to bots? The opening of an NPR report by Alix Siegel about reimagining the Milgram experiments for the age of robotics:

“In 2007, Christoph Bartneck, a robotics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, decided to stage an experiment loosely based on the famous (and infamous) Milgram obedience study.

In Milgram’s study, research subjects were asked to administer increasingly powerful electrical shocks to a person pretending to be a volunteer ‘learner’ in another room. The research subject would ask a question, and whenever the learner made a mistake, the research subject was supposed to administer a shock — each shock slightly worse than the one before.

As the experiment went on, and as the shocks increased in intensity, the ‘learners’ began to clearly suffer. They would scream and beg for the research subject to stop while a ‘scientist’ in a white lab coat instructed the research subject to continue, and in videos of the experiment you can see some of the research subjects struggle with how to behave. The research subjects wanted to finish the experiment like they were told. But how exactly to respond to these terrible cries for mercy?

Bartneck studies human-robot relations, and he wanted to know what would happen if a robot in a similar position to the ‘learner’ begged for its life. Would there be any moral pause? Or would research subjects simply extinguish the life of a machine pleading for its life without any thought or remorse?”


Stranley Milgram Obedience by djfaheezy

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“The United States Hired, Used, And Protected Several Thousand Nazi War Criminals”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s rightly understood that Jewish émigrés fleeing Nazism during WWII greatly enriched America’s arts and sciences, from Hollywood to higher education. It’s less acknowledged that at the end of the war, we also embraced Nazis and whitewashed their pasts to boost defense, space and technology programs. The chief example is NASA kingpin Wernher von Braun (see here and here), but there were a great many others. The opening of Richard Rashke’s new Daily Beast article “America’s Shameful Nazi Past“:

“The Nazi-hunting era that began with the thunder of a kettle drum at the Nuremberg trials in 1945 ended with a whimper in 2011.  After a much interrupted two-year trial, a federal court in Munich convicted John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker, of assisting in the deaths of 29,060 mostly Dutch Jews at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in eastern Poland. The court sentenced him to five years in prison. Because he posed no flight risk, it allowed him to live in a nursing home while his appeal wound its way through German courts.

Demjanjuk died before his appeal process was completed. Therefore, under German law, he is considered not guilty of a war crime and his criminal record in Germany has been expunged. After being hounded through courts in the United States, Israel, and Germany for more than 30 years, Demjanjuk stands guilty of only one crime—lying under oath on his 1951 visa application about his birth country and what he did during World War II.

In the two visa fraud cases the U.S. Department of Justice eventually brought against Demjanjuk, a federal court ruled that he had been trained as an SS guard at Trawniki, a Nazi camp not far from Sobibor, and that he had served as a Nazi death camp guard. But no U.S. criminal court actually tried Demjanjuk for any war crimes because it did not have jurisdiction to do so.

The Demjanjuk case illustrates America’s historical and schizophrenic treatment of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators. On the one hand, the United States aggressively tried some of them at Nuremberg, and deported others like Demjanjuk, who had acquired U.S. visas by fraud, granting extradition rights to those countries who wanted to try them. On the other hand, the United States hired, used, and protected several thousand Nazi war criminals and collaborators for scientific and espionage purposes.  The use and shielding of these criminals for more than 50 years was and is a massive obstruction of Holocaust justice.”

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“The Point Should Be To Get Newcomers Started Shooting Something”

January 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

It just occurred to me that children can’t get into comedy clubs but they can shoot firearms. You know, because bullets can only hurt you but words can kill. I’m all in favor of consenting adults having maximum liberty, but for me that doesn’t extend to minors. From Mike McIntire’s New York Times article about the gun industry’s attempts to woo youngsters with schemes that would not be permitted by companies pushing tobacco or alcohol or things that kill you slowly:

“The industry’s youth-marketing effort is backed by extensive social research and is carried out by an array of nonprofit groups financed by the gun industry, an examination by The New York Times found. The campaign picked up steam about five years ago with the completion of a major study that urged a stronger emphasis on the ‘recruitment and retention’ of new hunters and target shooters.

The overall objective was summed up in another study, commissioned last year by the shooting sports industry, that suggested encouraging children experienced in firearms to recruit other young people. The report, which focused on children ages 8 to 17, said these ‘peer ambassadors’ should help introduce wary youngsters to guns slowly, perhaps through paintball, archery or some other less intimidating activity.

‘The point should be to get newcomers started shooting something, with the natural next step being a move toward actual firearms,’ said the report, which was prepared for the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Hunting Heritage Trust.”

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“Ben Franklin Rocked One Of History’s Finest Bald-Mullets”

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

Jesse Lichtenstein has followed up his “Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?” article in Esquire with an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few excerpts follow.

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Question:

Who was the coolest postmaster general?

Answer:

Ben Franklin rocked one of history’s finest bald-mullets. And then there was Frank H. Hitchcock, 43rd postmaster, who paid a pilot out of his own pocket to demonstrate the usefulness of airplanes when the Army wasn’t convinced.

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Question:

Why does/should the USPS have a monopoly on a person’s mailbox? As I understand it, only the USPS can place mail in someone’s mailbox. Is that correct?

Answer:

This is correct. The post office is established in the US Constitution (in fact, the post office was established in 1775, before the US itself, but a federal post office is written into the constitution) and it’s been given this monopoly by law. In theory, that lawful monopoly could be changed by new legislation. 

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Question:

What’s the biggest problem you think we will face if the USPS does get shut down?

Answer:

I think there won’t be a lot of interest in the private sector in rebuilding anything with the scope of the USPS. And that means nothing close to the same delivery standards for the whole country, and probably much more variable pricing.

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Question:

Where do you see the future of the postal service industry, and what new and innovative inventions do you think will revolutionize the way we receive mail?

Answer:

I think the growth of ecommerce and our rising expectations that things can and should be delivered to us quickly could be the way that the postal service survives and even thrives. There’s a generational problem USPS has to grapple with. In broad strokes, more older people still want to do their business through the mail (bills, bank statements, etc. — they trust a hard copy) and more younger people have very little meaningful relationship with mail — except getting STUFF.

There’s also room for the postal service to grow into the area of hybrid mail. I talk about this in the piece — the idea that we should have scanned images of mail arrive in our inboxes and we can decide which pieces we want delivered, and when; and maybe for a fee, we could have the USPS open the mail and email us a scan. By the same token, we should be able to type something up, email a file to USPS, and have them deliver a physical document.

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Question:

Assuming you could ship a live animal, which would be easier: 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?

Answer:

It’s really a question of how much extra space you have to budget for containing the waste matter. Horses’ diets are so fiber-intensive, while ducks break it down to a liquid. I’m going with h-s duck.

“Then There Was The Small Matter Of The Murder”

January 27, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted before about Eadweard Muybridge, genius of nascent cinema who wound up on trial for murder. There’s a new book about him, The Inventor and the Tycoon, which receives a beautifully written review this week in the New York Times by Candice Millard. The opening:

“Genius, it seems, is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness. Those rare instances of genuine brilliance that we find scattered throughout history — in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the mathematical equations of John Nash — often appear to have come at great cost to the minds that produced them. The work of Eadweard Muybridge is no exception.

While Muybridge’s photographs are widely known, his personal life has been largely neglected, which seems incredible now that, in Edward Ball’s engrossing book, The Inventor and the Tycoon, we have the whole fascinating story, full of strange and surprising details. At the height of his genius, Muybridge, a British immigrant whose stunning advancements in photography in the mid-to-late 1800s astonished the world and gave rise to the motion picture industry, looked and generally lived like a vagabond. He dressed in clothing so tattered that his uncombed, usually unwashed, hair poked out of holes in his hat, and his pants threatened to fall off in pieces as he walked. He ate cheese flies, tiny insects that hover around the tops of old cheese and that he used to gather up into packages and snack on as he brooded over his photographs. Then there was the small matter of the murder.

In 1874, just a year after one of his most important breakthroughs, when he was well into the work that would make him famous, Muybridge killed a man.”

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“Ida Wood Never Had Any Intention Of Renewing Contact With The Outside World”

January 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a great long blog post by Karen Abbott at the Smithsonian about a pair of reclusive sisters who disappeared themselves in a Manhattan hotel room until death’s hand forced the door open:

Ida Wood never had any intention of renewing contact with the outside world, but on March 5, 1931, death made it necessary. At four o’clock that afternoon, the 93-year-old did something she hadn’t done in 24 years of living at the Herald Square Hotel: she voluntarily opened the door, craned her neck down the corridor, and called for help.

“Maid, come here!” she shouted. “My sister is sick. Get a doctor. I think she’s going to die.”

Over the next 24 hours various people filtered in and out of room 552: the hotel manager, the house physician of the nearby Hotel McAlpin and an undertaker, who summoned two lawyers from the venerable firm of O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early. The body of Ida’s sister, Miss Mary E. Mayfield, lay on the couch in the parlor, covered with a sheet. The room was crammed with piles of yellowed newspapers, cracker boxes, balls of used string, stacks of old wrapping paper and several large trunks. One of the lawyers, Morgan O’Brien Jr., began questioning hotel employees, trying to assemble the puzzle of this strange and disheveled life.

The manager said he had worked at the hotel for seven years and had never seen Ida Wood or her deceased sister. His records indicated that they had moved into the two-room suite in 1907, along with Ida’s daughter, Miss Emma Wood, who died in a hospital in 1928 at the age of 71. They always paid their bills in cash. The fifth-floor maid said she hadn’t gotten into the sisters’ suite at all, and only twice had persuaded the women to hand over soiled sheets and towels and accept clean ones through a crack in the door. A bellhop said that for many years it had been his habit to knock on the door once a day and ask the ladies if they wanted anything. They requested the same items every time: evaporated milk, crackers, coffee, bacon and eggs—which were cooked in a makeshift kitchenette in the bathroom—and occasionally fish, which they ate raw. Ida always tipped ten cents, telling him that money was the last she had in the world. From time to time they also requested Copenhagen snuff, Havana cigars and jars of petroleum jelly, which Ida massaged onto her face for several hours each day. She was five feet tall and 70 pounds, nearly deaf and stooped like a question mark, but her face still bore clear evidence of its former beauty. “You could see what an extraordinarily pretty woman she once was,” O’Brien noted. “Her complexion, in spite of her age, was as creamy and pink and unwrinkled as any I have ever seen. It was like tinted ivory. Her profile was like a lovely cameo.” She hadn’t had a bath in years.•

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“I’m Outraged By The FBI, The CIA And Computers That Seem To Have Cataloged Our Lives”

January 25, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Bill Boggs interviewing legendary thriller writer Robert Ludlum, who hasn’t let his 2001 death slow “his” writing output. No year specified, but it was likely 1982. Video less than stellar.

The opening of a 1977 People article about Ludlum: “‘I start every book with something that outrages me,’ says novelist Robert Ludlum. ‘I’m outraged by the FBI, the CIA and computers that seem to have catalogued our lives. Power too often is accompanied by irresponsibility.’

Ludlum, a former actor and producer, has managed to turn his fury into six best-selling thrillers since 1969. To date his books have sold over 10 million copies in 22 countries. ‘sit in total awe,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand it. I’m just grateful.’

His current hit, The Chancellor Manuscript, which fictionalizes the death of J. Edgar Hoover as part of a conspiracy, is in its fourth printing. The Gemini Contenders (twin brothers search for a religious document that would alter Christianity) is a paperback best-seller, and The Rhinemann Exchange (covert trade of diamonds for gyroscopes between the U.S. and Nazi Germany during WW II) reappeared on the paperback list after an NBC-TV miniseries in March.

Ludlum readers often take his fictionalized version of history seriously. ‘They all have a conspiracy they want to talk about,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, they want to talk at 3 a.m.’ The Ludlums now have an unlisted phone in their Leonia, N.J. home.

He also has a special following within the intelligence community—and some private complaints from one federal agency he won’t identify. “They have said, in effect: ‘We’re very displeased with you. Your nonsense is becoming offensive.’ My answer is: ‘Dreadfully sorry, old chap. I’m just a storyteller.’ But his fiction has come very close to truth. The Osterman Weekend, for example, about domestic CIA operations, was published two and a half years before the agency’s illegal wiretaps were exposed.”

 

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