Excerpts

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“During The Previous Five Years He Had Earned Forty-Three Million Dollars”

April 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his New Yorker article this week about Leland Stanford’s famed university, Ken Auletta poses a smart question which has largely gone unasked in the whir of excitement over students and teachers cashing in on start-ups: Has the line between Stanford and Silicon Valley been blurred to the detriment of education? An excerpt, in case you haven’t read it yet, about the big money Valley ties of the university’s brilliant president John L. Hennessy:

“Debra Satz, the senior associate dean for Humanities and Arts at Stanford, who teaches ethics and political philosophy, is troubled that Hennessy is handcuffed by his industry ties. This subject has often been discussed by faculty members, she says: ‘My view is that you can’t forbid the activity. Good things come out of it. But it raises dangers.’ Philippe Buc, a historian and a former tenured member of the Stanford faculty, says, ‘He should not be on the Google board. A leader doesn’t have to express what he wants. The staff will be led to pro-Google actions because it anticipates what he wants.’

Hennessy has also invested in such venture-capital firms as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Foundation Capital—companies that have received investment funds from the university’s endowment board, on which Hennessy sits. In 2007, an article published in the Wall Street Journal—’THE GOLDEN TOUCH OF STANFORD’S PRESIDENT’—highlighted the cozy relationship between Hennessy and Silicon Valley firms. The Journal reported that during the previous five years he had earned forty-three million dollars; a portion of that sum came from investments in firms that also invest Stanford endowment monies. Hennessy flicks aside criticism of those investments, noting that he isn’t actively involved in managing the endowment and likening them to a mutual fund: ‘I’m a limited partner. I couldn’t even tell you what most of these investments were in.’

Perhaps because his position is so seemingly secure, and his assets so considerable, Hennessy rarely appears defensive. He knows that questions about conflicts of interest won’t define his legacy, and they seem less pressing when Stanford is thriving. Facebook’s purchase of Instagram made millions for, among others, Sequoia Capital—which means that it made money for Hennessy and for Stanford’s endowment, too.”

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“Undoubtedly Notable Figures Of Those Times”

April 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I found this classic 19th-century illustration with the following caption: “The celebrated Terrier dog ‘Major’ killing 100 rats in 8 minutes, 58 seconds. The artist has taken great care to note the facial features of the spectators, undoubtedly notable figures of those times.”

“In The Future, Neither The Physical World Nor The Digital World Will Be Sufficient By Itself”

April 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Donald Melanson’s Endgadget interview with Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s Principal Researcher, a discussion of NUI (Natural User Interfaces), such as Surface-like devices:

“Are there areas that you think could benefit from natural user interfaces that haven’t yet?

I would say that we have just scratched the surface in this regard. We live in the physical world, and for a long time there was no digital world. Today we have some connections between the two worlds, but when we can truly blend them together, we get something completely new, something we are only now beginning to understand. This is why this is the most exciting time in my career since the first time I used a computer 41 years ago. Compared to what we have done in the past, what we can do today is fantastic. Compared to where we have the potential to be in 10-20 years, we still have a lot of work to do. We still work with computers. But reflecting what I said above, that is just a stepping stone to getting to the point where we are unaware that we are dealing with computers. As the saying goes, people don’t want a hammer or nail, nor even a hole in the wall. They want their picture hanging on the wall at the spot where they want it. That is the high order task. Every time you encounter an issue dealing with some intermediate step or tool in doing some higher order activity, that may well be an opportunity for a more natural, or appropriate means of accomplishing it.

In the future, neither the physical world nor the digital world will be sufficient by itself. The ability to translate your real-world experience metaphorically into the things that you want to do in the virtual world is key.”

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Microsoft Office Labs vision, 2019, featuring natural user interfaces:

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“I Think Everyone Should Come To Dubai. It Would Bring A Lot Of Peace To The World.”

April 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dubai, 1971.

From Tom Wodicka’s recent article about Douglas Coupland’s first visit to Dubai:

“I felt Dubai was a city ripe for his fiction. Had he ever thought about placing a novel here?

‘Until this trip I would never have been so presumptuous. One reason I’m glad I came is that all the things about Emirati culture that were really alien to me … clothing … architecture … art … suddenly made sense, so when I see things Arabic back home now, instead of being confused, I think, I know what that means.

‘I think everyone should come to Dubai. It would bring a lot of peace to the world. I’m always attracted to situations where new electronic patterns collide with the old. I can now very easily imagine writing a story set in that huge Dubai Mall wherein everyone talks only by texting and screen snaps.’

He then spoke about one of the strongest impressions Dubai left on him: ‘I think the key thing about the Emirati world right now is that it’s beginning to define itself as itself, as opposed to importing creativity from elsewhere. So it’s a pivotal moment for the region’s young artists: can they translate their experience and emotion into a form that makes others elsewhere understand their world more? It seems like there’s this whole massive mode of being that’s itching to be understood. And you’re getting a new museum [a modern art facility in Emaar’s Downtown Dubai development]. Young artists are going to have to fill it.'”

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“I Came From An Environment Where I Was Starved For Information, Starved For Connection”

April 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Chris Anderson’s new Wired Q&A with computing legend Marc Andreessen, who created the first popular graphical web browser:

“Chris Anderson: At 22, you’re a random kid from small-town Wisconsin, working at a supercomputer center at the University of Illinois. How were you able to see the future of the web so clearly?

Marc Andreessen: It was probably the juxtaposition of the two—being from a small town and having access to a supercomputer. Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors’ phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away. So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.

Anderson: And then at Illinois, you found the Internet.

Andreessen: Right, which could make information so abundant. The future was much easier to see if you were on a college campus. Remember, it was feast or famine in those days. Trying to do dialup was miserable. If you were a trained computer scientist and you put in a tremendous amount of effort, you could do it: You could go get a Netcom account, you could set up your own TCP/IP stack, you could get a 2,400-baud modem. But at the university, you were on the Internet in a way that was actually very modern even by today’s standards. At the time, we had a T3 line—45 megabits, which is actually still considered broadband. Sure, that was for the entire campus, and it cost them $35,000 a month! But we had an actual broadband experience. And it convinced me that everybody was going to want to be connected, to have that experience for themselves.”

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“Our DVD Players Are Following Our VCRs To The Junkyard”

April 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As DVDs become an increasingly marginal product in this age of streaming, will Netflix too be shunted aside by the lower entry costs of businesses that deal purely in digital data? From Nicholas Thompson’s post, “Is Netflix Doomed?” on the New Yorker’s Culture blog:

“It’s a bad time, too, for Netflix to have declining subscriber loyalty. The company believes that the mail-order-DVD business is finished, and that our DVD players are following our VCRs to the junkyard. So it is killing off that part of its business. Unfortunately, though, that’s the part with the high barriers to entry. It’s not easy for a startup to build massive warehouses and systems for mailing discs. It is easy, however, to get into the streaming business. Yesterday, for example, we learned of a startup called NimbleTV, which plans to let you watch all the channels you subscribe to through your cable provider on your phone or your tablet. If you had that, would you want Netflix, too?”

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“The incredible new world of DVD,” 1997:

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“You Can Stop The Train By Pushing A Fat Man Onto The Tracks”

April 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a really good FiveBooks interview with philosopher David Edmonds at the Browser, a succinct explanation of the thought experiment, the Trolley Problem:

“What is a trolley problem?

There are two basic trolley problems. The first problem, invented by a philosopher called Philippa Foot, is that a trolley is going to kill five people on the rails. The question is whether you should turn the trolley onto another set of tracks on a spur where there is just one person. So you can save five lives at the cost of one life. Almost everyone, when you ask them that question, says you should do that and kill the one person.

Another moral philosopher called Judith Jarvis Thomson came up with another trolley problem, the ‘fat man’ problem. The trolley is going along as before, and is going to kill five people. But this time you’re on a footbridge, and you can stop the train by pushing a fat man onto the tracks, who is so large that his bulk will stop the train and save the five lives. The question, again, is whether you should save five lives by sacrificing one. But 90% of people think it’s wrong to push the fat man.

Because it’s a more active way to kill the one man than in the first scenario?

That’s one possible psychological explanation. But there’s a third version of the trolley problem where instead of pushing the fat man, by turning a switch he will fall through a trapdoor, stop the train and save the five people. When you ask people that, most people still say you shouldn’t kill the fat man. More people are willing to turn the switch than push the fat man, but not dramatically more. The first trolley problem has been around since 1967, the fat man version appears in the 1980s, and nobody agrees exactly what the distinction is between them. It doesn’t look like it’s to do with the different actions.

The point of the trolley problem is to figure out what principle distinguishes those two variations – and, more importantly, what that tells us about real life cases.”

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“He Then Went On To Build A Very Simple Robot That Remained In His Mother’s Garden Shed For The Next 30 Years”

April 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From an article by David L. Chandler on Physorg, a capsule of the early education of Rodney Brooks, the robotics experts from Errol Morris’ great film, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control:

“The former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described growing up in in Adelaide, Australia. While he had never heard of MIT, he was an inveterate tinkerer who became intrigued early on by robotics.

In the early 1960s, Brooks recalled, he built a very primitive computer, using vacuum tubes, that had a total random access memory capacity of 64 bits (or 8 bytes) and took a year and a half to build. He then went on to build a very simple robot that remained in his mother’s garden shed for the next 30 years, he said.

After seeing the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, he became intrigued by HAL, the movie’s intelligent, responsive computer. ‘He was a murdering psychopath,’ Brooks quipped — but nonetheless an impressive portrayal of machine intelligence.

Brooks’ first exposure to the Institute came when he read that an MIT professor named Marvin Minsky had been a consultant to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick; he immediately decided he wanted to attend MIT.

That dream took a while to realize: Brooks was turned down for graduate school at MIT, and turned down again — twice — for faculty positions after earning his doctorate at Stanford University. ‘Rejection is not the end,’ he advised the students, saying that it’s important to persevere in pursuit of one’s dreams: ‘Persistence pays off.'”

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Rodney Brooks, roboticist:

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“Long Island Has Some Of The Stranger Family Homicides”

April 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Ron Rosenbaum’s reliably idiosyncratic work, his 1993 New York Times Magazine article about the violent underbelly of Long Island’s bedroom communities, where the only rest for the weary is often the big sleep:

“A UNIFIED FIELD theory of longing would go a long way toward explaining what sometimes seems like an epidemic of desperate — and often desperately incompetent — spouse-murder plots on the Guyland. Recently I immersed myself in some 10 years of tabloid clippings on sensational Long Island homicides and came away with two powerful impressions. First, that the most sensational ones were almost always intrafamily homicides or spouse slayings. Now it’s true that, cross-culturally, homicides among intimates occur more frequently than ‘stranger’ homicides. But in another sense of the word, there’s no doubt Long Island has some of the stranger family homicides, stranger and more desperate. That was the second impression I had from study of the tabloid clips: the desperate longing to get the deed done — however bizarrely, incompetently or self-revealingly — often proved to be the undoing of the doer.

Consider this 1988 New York Post story, not one of the most sensational but representative of the broad midrange of Long Island spouse slayings. It appeared under the headline: ACCUSED HUBBY-KILLER’S HUNT FOR HIT MAN

The trial testimony therein described a woman who might be called the Ancient Mariner of Spouse Slayers — she soliciteth one of three:

‘A Long Island housewife on trial for arranging her husband’s murder openly sought a hit man several times, witnesses testified.’

The key word here is ‘openly.’ She ‘tried to hire a fellow church member, a county official and an undercover cop to kill [ her husband ] prior to his November 1986 bludgeoning death.’

‘Are you connected to the mob?’ she asked a county official with an Italian surname shortly after meeting him. ‘I’m looking for someone to kill my husband.’

Yes, surely this goes on in the rest of America, but not, I feel, with the urgency Long Islanders bring to it.” (Thanks TETW.)

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In 1979, an earnest Merv Griffin interviews Kathleen and George Lutz, the Long Island couple at the center of the Amityville Horror hokum.

Read also:

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“We Shape Our Tools, And Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us”

April 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Lewis Lapham’s TomDispatch post about publishing and technology, a passage about Marshall McLuhan’s idea that what we create ends up creating us:

“Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect — from Google, YouTube, and Facebook — the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of ‘an acoustic world,’ one with ‘no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,’ a new ‘information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever.’ He published Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the premise that ‘we become what we behold,’ that ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’

Media were to be understood as ‘make-happen agents’ rather than as ‘make-aware agents,’ not as art or philosophy but as systems comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers. Content follows form; new means of communication give rise to new structures of feeling and thought.”

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“Hollywood Will Be Destroyed And No One Will Notice”

April 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hollywood is certainly moving ass-backwards through our technological revolution, but it seems a stretch to say that it will be undone by crowdsourcing. Decentralized by more people having better filmmaking tools, sure, but not toppled by the defeat of personal vision. Jimmy Wales disagrees, however. From Wired:

“Jimmy Wales has a message for Hollywood: You’re doomed, it won’t be piracy that kills you, and nobody will care.

The Wikipedia founder, delivering a keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva, predicted that Hollywood will likely share the same fate as Encyclopedia Britannica, which shut down its print operation this year after selling just 3,000 copies last year.

‘Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice,’ Wales said. But it won’t be Wikipedia (or Encarta) that kills the moviemaking industry: ‘Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica,‘ he said.”

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“I Am Wondering If You Would Be Interested In Learning The Truth”

April 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of my favorite non-fiction pieces so far this year is “The Secret Life of a Society Maven,” an article in the New York Times by Alan Feuer. Last year, Feuer tracked down his doppelganger, a seeming cash-poor society swell of Austrian descent named Alan Z. Feuer, and wrote an article about this eccentric old word figure. But when the elder Feur died recently, his journalistic namesake learned a more complete backstory, a Gatsby-esque tale of deception and reinvention. An excerpt:

“One day, 20 messages appeared in my inbox: notes from Alan’s friends, who had seen my piece last spring and were writing to inform me of ‘his passing.’ There were links to Alan’s Facebook page and to a guest book on Legacy.com. There I found my counterpart passionately praised, in dozens — hundreds — of posts as ‘the last true society gentleman,’ ‘the Grand Patriarch of New York City balls,’ ‘the Oscar Wilde of our time.’

‘Alan,’ someone wrote, ‘your Waltz will be danced forever in the lives of all those you have touched with the love of White Gloves and White Ties. Rest in peace, dear friend, and save a dance.’

At last, there was only one unopened message in my queue. Saddened, I clicked it. This is what it said:

Dear Mr. Feuer,

Ever since reading your article about the other Alan Feuer, I have thought about writing to you. I had no desire to disrupt his life while he was alive, but since he has passed away, I am wondering if you would be interested in learning the truth about his background.

The writer, I was shocked to find, was the other Alan’s stepniece; she told me she had known him since she was 5. Her letter laid out the family’s relationships — I knew that Alan was estranged — and then concluded on a melancholy note.

While the adult life he described to you was certainly true, his background was far from the one he claimed. If you would be interested in further information about this sad and, I think, somewhat troubled man, please feel free to contact me.

Needless to say, I did.”

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“In 2050, Amsterdam’s Red Light District Will All Be About Android Prostitutes”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Is it possible to reduce STDs and sex trafficking and still make the world ickier? Perhaps. From the Edmonton Sun:

“Sex workers in Amsterdam will have a hard time finding work if two New Zealand academics’ vision of the future comes true.

‘In 2050, Amsterdam’s red light district will all be about android prostitutes who are clean of sexual transmitted infections, not smuggled in from Eastern Europe and forced into slavery, the city council will have direct control over android sex workers controlling prices, hours of operations and sexual services,’ write futurologist Ian Yeoman and sexologist Michelle Mars.

The duo’s paper, ‘Robots, Men And Sex Tourism,’ published in the journal Futures, centres on an imaginary future sex club in Amsterdam called Yub-Yum.

It posits that sex tourists will dish out big cash for all-inclusive robot sex romps.”

“They’re Living Twenty Years In The Future For All Practical Purposes”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of our interconnected digital world, answering a Wired query about how he shepherded the Internet from proprietary to public:

“Wired: So how did the internet get beyond the technical and academic community?

Cerf: Xerox invented the Alto machine which was a $50,000 personal computer given to every employee of Xerox PARC — so they’re living twenty years in the future for all practical purposes. They were even inventing their own internet. They had a whole suite of protocols. Some of the students that worked with me in Stanford went to work with Xerox PARC, so there was a lot of cross-fertilization.

It’s just that they decided to treat their protocol as proprietary, and Bob and I were desperate to have a non-proprietary protocol for the military to use. We said we’re not going to patent it, we’re not going to control it. We’re going to release it to the world as soon as it’s available, which we did.

So by 1988, I’m seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, ‘Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?’ There were no public internet services at that point.

And there was a rule that the government had instituted that said you could not put commercial traffic on government-sponsored backbones, and, in this case, it was the ARPANET run by ARPA or for ARPA; the NSFNet run for the National Science Foundation, and there were others. The Department of Energy has ESnet and NASA had what was called the NASA Science Internet. The rule was no commercial traffic on any of them. So I thought, ‘Well, you know, we’re never going to get commercial networking until we have the business community seeing that commercial networking is actually a business possibility.’

So I went to the US government, specifically to a committee called the Federal Networking Council since they had the program managers from various agencies and they had been funding internet research. I said, ‘Would you give me permission to connect MCI Mail, a commercial e-mail service, to the internet as a test?’

Of course, my purpose was to break the rule that said you couldn’t have commercial traffic on the backbone.

And so they kind of grumbled for a while and they said, ‘Well, OK. Do it for a year.’”

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A 1974 demo of the Xerox Alto:

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“Neil Harris Has Coined A Phrase For This Fascination With Seeing Things Work, The Operational Aesthetic”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Americans loved gadgets before WWII, but the money wasn’t there to invest in machines during the Great Depression. A good part of the American postwar dividends was spent on machinery to ease life’s toil and just amaze, from kitchen appliances to bowling alley pinsetters. They had utility, but they were also fun to watch. Was our desire to see machines do their magic rooted in P.T. Barnum’s chicanery? Probably not. It’s probably an innate thing. But it’s an interesting theory. From Edward Tenner’s Atlantic essay, “The Pleasures of Seeing Machines Work“:

“The cultural historian Neil Harris has coined a phrase for this fascination with seeing things work, the Operational Aesthetic. One of the pleasures of bowling for postwar generations was the introduction of the automated pinspotter, the Roomba of the 1950s, which helped the sport’s explosive growth in the decade.

Who started it all? Harris has suggested it was none other than P.T. Barnum, whose American Museum in New York was widely (and rightly) suspected of fakery. But that helped build business. Visitors wanted to see for themselves, scrutinize the exhibits closely, and detect just how each illusion was accomplished. Barnum’s success was based not on cynicism about ‘suckers,’ but to the contrary, in appealing to critical intelligence to detect how it all was done.”

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The history of Brunswick pinsetters:

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“The Earth Is A Crumb In A Supermarket Of Resources”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A bunch of rich guys, including James Cameron, Ross Perot, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Peter H. Diamandis, may be announcing tomorrow that they are getting into the business of asteroid mining, extracting precious resources from zooming space rocks. From Forbes:

“Diamandis has been interested in asteroid mining for a long time, and it sounds like this might be his time to put a plan into action. There are staggering amounts of gold in them thar asteroids, even if they are sort of far away.

‘The earth is a crumb in a supermarket of resources,” Diamandis told Forbes earlier this year. “Now we finally have the technology to extract resources outside earth for the benefit of humanity without having to rape and pillage our planet.'”

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Hyperspace, not free of risk, is nonetheless a handy option:

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“Stimulants Do Much More Than Keep Troops Awake”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

No surprise that there’s been a marked spike in usage of stimulants by American soldiers with our military taxed by wars on two fronts for a decade. From “Why Are We Drugging Our Soldiers?” by Richard A. Friedman in the New York Times:

“But there is another factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder, one that has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops.

There has been a significant increase in the use of stimulant medication. Documents that I obtained in late 2010 through the Freedom of Information Act, and have recently analyzed, show that annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 — more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.

Stimulants are widely used in the civilian population to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder because they increase focus and attention. Short of an unlikely epidemic of that disorder among our soldiers, the military almost certainly uses the stimulants to help fatigued and sleep-deprived troops stay alert and awake. (A spokesman for Tricare attributed the sharp rise to ‘the increased recognition and diagnosis of A.D.H.D. by medical providers.’ However, while there is greater recognition of the disorder, the diagnoses are concentrated in children and adolescents.)

Stimulants do much more than keep troops awake. They can also strengthen learning. By causing the direct release of norepinephrine — a close chemical relative of adrenaline — in the brain, stimulants facilitate memory formation. Not surprisingly, emotionally arousing experiences — both positive and negative — also cause a surge of norepinephrine, which helps to create vivid, long-lasting memories. That’s why we tend to remember events that stir our feelings and learn best when we are a little anxious.”

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“We Will Be Able To Keep A Thousand ‘Pictures’ In A Box As Big As A Dictionary”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Picture 3 in the third row from the top looks like a precursor to Shepard Fairey's Obey the Giant.

On the gorgeous, newly redesigned Los Angeles Review of Books site, Hua Hsu writes about the history of office chair designs. In his piece, he mentions the legendary Italian designer Bruno Munari’s 1966 book, Design as Art. An excerpt from the book about the house of the future:

“The private house of the future (some are already lived in) will be as compact and comfortable as possible, easy to run and easy to keep clean without the trouble and expense of servants. A lot of single pieces of furniture will be replaced by built-in cupboards, and maybe we shall even achieve the simplicity, the truly human dimensions, of the traditional Japanese house, a tradition that is still alive.

In the house of the future, reduced as it will be to minimum size but equipped with the most practical gadgets, we will be able to keep a thousand ‘pictures’ in a box as big as a dictionary and project them on our white wall with an ordinary projector just as often as we please. And I do not mean colour photographs, but original works of art. With these techniques visual art will survive even if the old techniques disappear. Art is not technique, as everyone knows, and an artist can create with anything that comes to hand.”

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Munari sharing design lessons with schoolchildren on Italian TV, 1976:

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“The Little Devices Most Of Us Carry Around Are So Powerful That They Change Not Only What We Do, But Also Who We Are”

April 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Connectivity doesn’t guarantee closeness. In fact, we may seem closer together and actually be further apart than ever. From “The Flight From Conversation,” Sherry Turkle’s New York Times essay:

“Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being ‘alone together.’ Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.”

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Turkle, talking to people about how we don’t talk to people:

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Astronauts, After Desert Survival Training (1964)

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech | Permalink

Although they’re dressed like sheiks rather than spacemen, the 14 robed figures in this classic photograph had just completed the grueling three-day Astronaut Desert Survival School near the Stead Air Force base in Nevada. Mercury and Apollo astronauts were brought not only to the scorched sands of Nevada but transported all around the nation to prepare them for the rigors of outer space. An excerpt from Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon: 

“There was some heavy and intense training to be carried out. The men had to condition their bodies to withstand multiple stresses such as those associated with weightlessness and acceleration, vibration, immobilization and disorientation, noise, and heat and cold. They had become proficient in the use of dozens of training devices and rescue aids, to simulate a number of incidents and learn how to avoid or survive them.

Just as they had undergone contingency training in the Panamanian jungle, the astronauts could not exclude a landing in the ferocious heat and isolation of the desert, so after the classroom studies it was back on the road again. They were transported to a survival-training group near Stead AFB in the dry sagebrush country of western Nevada. Once again they could use only the equipment they would have at hand after an emergency landing as their survival gear. 

Apart from survival training, field trips saw the astronauts conveyed to all corners of the country, where they were acquainted with geological compositions similar to those they might encounter on the moon’s surface. They descended into the mile-deep grandeur of the Grand Canyon, scouted the Big Bend country of the Rio Grande, visited the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in the Katmai Monument in Alaska, and crunched over black lava flows in Arizona’s Sunset Crater.”

“The Human Mind Is Complex Enough To Integrate Hypocrisy And Contradictions”

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Racism is not always a black-and-white thing. There are shades of gray in the minds of racists, allowing them to convince themselves that, no, they aren’t bigots. Some can accept people of other races in a lesser social position but not those in a superior one. Others can write off members of another race who’ve excelled as exceptions, while still believing “the rule.” We’re all prone to believe generalizations without holding ourseves to account. From Touré in Time:

“Racism is a mental tumor. It’s an acceptance of stereotypes, of otherness, of fear, of racial hierarchies. It requires embracing the concept of constants about certain racial groups even though there are no biological certainties about the races. Scientifically, there is only the human race. Race as we know it is a social construct and, in the sweep of human history, a relatively recent concept invented in America to justify having both “liberty for all” and slavery. Racism has long had sub-ideas protecting it like bodyguards—the idea that blacks were lesser human beings with inferior brain power and morality and criminal proclivities aided in the perpetuation of slavery, Jim Crow and the current wave of criminalization in which young black men are considered synonymous with criminals—some have captured this via the term “criminalblackman.”

Some people suggest that the multiracial embrace of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Will Smith and others portends the end of racism. But this, as the writer Arundati Roy says, is like the President pardoning one turkey before Thanksgiving and then eating another—and America eats thousands. The human mind is complex enough to integrate hypocrisy and contradictions. There have long been extraordinary blacks who succeeded far more than the vast majority and were accepted as special. The racist mind need not hate every black person it encounters, and indeed not hating all may serve as a valuable safety valve, releasing pressure and proving to the mind itself that it is not racist. Few people want to think of themselves as bad or evil.”

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“We’re Geniuses One Day And Absolute Morons The Next”

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Howard Katz, in charge of NFL scheduling, has trillions of options to consider when figuring out which matchups will best serve the league during any given season. And no schedule he designs will completely satisfy networks, players and fans. From Judy Battista in the New York Times:

“After recalling what he thought was a coup last year — putting a game between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts on the Sunday night opposite the World Series, only to watch the Saints obliterate a Peyton Manning-less Colts team, 62-7 — Katz summed up the snap judgments of the schedule that are as quick to change as a channel.

‘We’re geniuses one day and absolute morons the next,’ he said.

For the networks that pay billions of dollars to carry N.F.L. games, they have been mostly geniuses. N.F.L. games were watched by an average of 17.5 million viewers last season, the second most since 1989, and off slightly from 2010. N.F.L. games accounted for 23 of the 25 most-watched television shows among all programming, and the 16 most-watched shows on cable last fall.

Designing a schedule that generates those ratings, while also guaranteeing competitive fairness, is more complicated than ever, even though a computer program in use for eight years now does some of the work that was once done entirely by hand — spitting out 400,000 complete or partial schedules from a possible 824 trillion game combinations.”

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“Human Networks, Like Words In English, Have Long Tails Of Diminishing Usage”

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends." (Image by Gilberto Santa Rosa.)

Can we, in this wired and connected age, have privacy as well as intimacy? Are we to break free from the shackles of Zuckerberg and allow the rise of networks that afford us more control of our lives? Or will we obediently create the content for channels that others program? From Ben Kunz’s new Businessweek article about the rise of “unsocial” networks:

“For nearly a decade, marketers have been agog over the promise of social networks to provide free advertising, a cascade of word-of-mouth in which consumers act as advocates for a brand or product. The dream is based in part on Robert Metcalfe’s law—the concept by the inventor of the Ethernet that in any networked system, value grows exponentially as more users join. Like the old 1970s shampoo commercial, you tell a customer about your product, and she tells two friends, and so on, and so on, until the world is knocking on your hair-products door. Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends.

Trouble is, Metcalfe was wrong, at least with human networks. In a landmark 2006 column in IEEE Spectrum, researchers Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly showed mathematically that networks have a fundamental flaw if all nodes are not created equal. The authors pointed primarily to Zipf’s law, a concept by 1930s linguist George Zipf that in any system of resources, there exists declining value for each subsequent item. In the English language, we use the word ‘the’ in 7 percent of all utterances, followed by ‘of’ for 3.5 percent of words, with trailing usage of terms ending somewhere around the noun ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ On Facebook, your connections work the same way from your spouse to best friend to boss to that old girlfriend who now lives in Iceland.

Human networks, like words in English, have long tails of diminishing usage.”

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“And so on and so on and so on…”:

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“One Of Its Main Byproducts Is The Replacement Of Low-Productivity Workers With Computers”

April 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The newest breed of information companies (Google excluded) create wealth, not jobs. That’s not an accusation, just a fact. Economist Brian Arthur refers to this dynamic as the “Second Economy,”–new technology shrinking the American workforce in an inversion of how railroad technology increased it during the 19th century. From Bill Davidow’s smart, recent article about the Second Economy at the Atlantic:

“When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months), analysts tripped over themselves looking for an explanation. Of course, jobs numbers are bound to vary, but in my view the long-term trend calls for more jobs to disappear, and the reason is clear as day: the exploding Second Economy.

The Second Economy — a term the economist Brian Arthur  uses to describe the computer-intensive portion of the economy — is, quite simply, the virtual economy. One of its main byproducts is the replacement of low-productivity workers with computers. It’s growing by leaps and bounds, brimming with optimistic entrepreneurs, and spawning a new generation of billionaires. In fact, the booming Second Economy will probably drive much of the economic growth in the coming decades.

Unfortunately, the Second Economy will not create many jobs.”

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“Assembly lines that fix themselves”:

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“His Dream Of Building A Full-Sized Jet Simulator Began Nearly 20 Years Ago”

April 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Some people move noses of aircrafts into their garages so that they can enjoy a flight simulator hobby. James Price is one of those people. From Zoe Francis at the Mercury News:

“In his spacious three-car garage Price has a well-traveled jetliner cockpit tucked in next to the family car.

Aviation experts say Price, 52, is one of only a handful of people in the world who have built their own flight simulator cockpit in an actual jet nose.

His dream of building a full-sized jet simulator began nearly 20 years ago when Price joined an online group of flight simulator hobbyists — folks who typically use computer flight simulator programs or build fake cockpits at home.

Price, an air traffic controller and a private pilot who’s never flown a jet but dreams of doing so one day, began buying genuine 737 parts and building mock cockpits.

‘My first couple of versions of the cockpit … were just basically made up of wood in my spare room in my house.'”

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