Excerpts

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“iRobot Is Designing A Robotic Mower”

April 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Lawns are pretty to look at but dubious environmentally and imprisoning socially. As long as we have them, however, it’s no surprise the makers of Roomba would like to extend their robot helpers to the out of doors as automatic mowers–lawnbots. The problem is that the proposed system would make it difficult for astronomers to conduct their work with ginormous radio telescopes. From Davey Alba at Wired:

WHO CAN HATE a Roomba? Astronomers, that’s who.

The robotic vacuums we all know and love ensure we don’t have to clean our own homes ourselves to get them spotless. (God forbid.) Now, the Roomba’s maker, iRobot, wants to do for lawn care what it did for vacuuming. According to filings with the FCC spotted by IEEE Spectrum, iRobot is designing a robotic mower—news that should elate lazy people the world over.

But one group is really, really unhappy about this boon to the slothful: Astronomers. Some of them are so upset, in fact, that their objections might put the kibosh on the whole thing. How could this be? In a scenario that sounds straight out of the Golden Age of scifi, it all comes down to robots versus telescopes, and how they all communicate.•

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“Facebook Wants To ‘Give People The Power To Experience Anything'”

April 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oculus Rift, the VR firm acquired by Facebook, may end up being an educational tool, but its value will depend on if we learn lessons good or bad. Of course, we’ve managed to perpetrate genocide, slavery and other atrocities without any aid from virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke to the efficacy of his new toy, though his words unintentionally came out sounding as much like a threat as a promise, not a first for him. From Kerry Flynn at International Business Times:

Facebook Inc. spent $2 billion to buy Oculus VR, a maker of virtual reality wearables, in March 2014. Over a year later, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still trying to justify the deal. With the Oculus Rift headset, which has yet to hit the consumer market, Facebook wants to “give people the power to experience anything,” Zuckerberg said during a public Q&A held on his Facebook page Tuesday.

“Even if you don’t have the ability to travel somewhere or to be with someone in person, or even if something is physically impossible to build in our analog world, the goal is to help build a medium that will give you the ability to do all of these things you might not otherwise be able to do,” Zuckerberg wrote.•

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“They Allow You To Do Things In Fundamentally Different And Better Ways”

April 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In freestyle chess and in factories alike, carbon and silicon make for a great combination–it’s win-win. But in the long run (and perhaps not even too long from now), if humans or robots are going to be ejected from the workforce, which is more likely to go? From Matt McFarland at the Washington Post, a report about YuMi, your new coworker:

YuMi was designed to require about the same amount of space as a human worker, so it can easily slide into roles alongside humans in factories. YuMi is safe enough that ABB chief executive Ulrich Spiesshofer encouraged German chancellor Angela Merkel to put her finger in YuMi’s grip at an event Monday.

These companies see a huge opportunity in manufacturing to grow their businesses. A Boston Consulting Group report from earlier this year found that only 10 percent of manufacturing tasks are automated.

They say they have strong interest from China’s massive manufacturing sector. One of Rethink Robotics’ clients in China loses 25 percent of its workforce a month. That churn rate requires it to constantly retain workers, which hampers its efficiency.

“We will get to a point in time, whether it’s five years from now or 10 year from now, where you will not be a successful manufacturer if you do not have collaborative robots in your environment,” said Jim Lawton, chief product and marketing officer at Rethink Robotics. “They allow you to do things in fundamentally different and better ways.” …

The robotic elephant in the room is this: What happens to employment? Won’t jobs be swept away by the tide of automation?

“If you look at the countries with the highest level of robotization and automation, these are the countries with the lowest unemployment rates in the world,” Spiesshofer said. “Germany, Japan and South Korea have the highest robotization and the lowest unemployment rates. So for me, a smart application of a robot is a job security measure, it’s a job creation machine, if you do it right. The combination between human beings and robots to add additional jobs rather than destroy them.”•

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“Wikipedia Represents The Utopian Ideals Of The Early Internet”

April 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Noah Rayman of Time wonders whether Wikipedia, one of the Internet’s great triumphs, can remain relevant. The nonprofit reference guide, currently under the leadership of Soviet-born, Berkeley-educated executive director, Lila Tretikov, faces myriad challenges, but it certainly has a better shot at continued pertinency than Time does. An excerpt:

In many ways, Wikipedia represents the utopian ideals of the early Internet as conceived by the researchers and academics who created it: a vast database of knowledge, available to all humanity, for free, forever. For millennia, encyclopedias have been a hallmark of civilization, from the enormous Four Great Books of Song of 11th-century China to the crowning intellectual achievement of the Enlightenment Era, the humanist Encyclopédie banned by monarchs across Europe. It is the original cloud. Or as Wikimedia’s “vision statement” puts it: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.” But as the Web has spread around the globe, becoming an engine of commerce more than an academic or literary paradise, the place of a free website run by a nonprofit and largely curated by a handful of volunteers is far from certain.

Indeed, the future of Wikipedia has increasingly come into doubt over the past few years. Some observers question how long the website can stay relevant. Behemoths like Google and Facebook—the first and second largest websites, respectively—have billions of dollars at their disposal to pursue lofty goals like cataloguing the sum of knowledge or connecting every human being to the Internet. By contrast, Tretikov heads a non-profit with a relatively meager annual budget of $59 million that comes almost entirely from donations. A team of about 215 full-time employees headquartered in San Francisco oversees the work of roughly 85,000 active volunteer editors who seem to have divergent views about almost everything, from proper punctuation to the role that the Foundation should play in the operation of the site. “I do not envy Lila Tretikov’s position,” says William Beutler, a Wikipedia editor since 2006 and author of The Wikipedian, a blog that reports on the goings-on of the website and its army of editors.

Lack of resources is not Wikipedia’s only challenge.•

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“We Continue To Cling To A Model That Doesn’t Support This Kind Of Revolutionary Progress”

April 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Reconciling free-market capitalism and a highly automated society is one of the great challenges we’re likely to face in the near future. In a Medium essay, Sean Lester doesn’t believe reconciliation is possible. An excerpt:

To summarize, we’re automating the SHIT out of work right now with simple AI and robotics. With technological progress being exponential as it is (stop thinking linearly you dufus) robots you MAY hear about as being wacky and impractical and expensive today will be cheaper, faster, and better than your average human tomorrow. With AI advancements, even creative work is at risk (as the above video will explain). Even outside the more sci-fi sounding stuff, there’s a growing trend for companies with a fraction of the employees of their competition rivaling and crushing them. The examples thrown around a lot are the handful of people at Instagram today versus the many thousands of yesterday’s Kodak — or the Ubers and Lyfts rivaling taxi companies and other forms of public transport.

Which is dumb as hell. Work is being eliminated because corporations want to cut costs, not because they want a future where humans don’t have to get up and go to pointless jobs every day for diminishing wages only to not be able to cover their expenses or pay off their college loans. However, what worries me is that in the face of overwhelming evidence that we’re eliminating work on a very short timeline (shorter than the average person imagines or is prepared for) the conversation is never “We did it fellas. Time to pack up, we finally killed work!” No, that isn’t what people are saying. People are saying, “WHAT ABOUT THE JOBS!?” because we continue to cling to a model that doesn’t support this kind of revolutionary progress. The fact I can’t start writing an article that criticizes this failing of capitalism at all without fearing knee-jerk reactions by dogmatic capitalists is the problem. We can’t even begin having a conversation about it, because to propose a criticism of a thing is similar to saying “Hey tribe, I’m in THIS tribe now, fuck you!” This isn’t about being on this side or that side, though. This is about looking objectively at the reality standing in front of us and confronting it honestly.•

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“How Shall The New Environment Be Programmed Now That We Have Become So Involved With Each Other?”

April 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two passages from Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, which wondered about the new reality for privacy, connectedness, printed matter and jobs.

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From The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects:

How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? I have here before me…Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions–the patterns of mechanistic technologies–are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval by the electrically computerized dossier bank–that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes.” We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?•

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From Jane Howard’s 1966 Life magazine article, “Oracle of the Electric Age“:

No people in the history of humanity, McLuhan insists, ever faced demands as grueling as those that confront us. We are witnessing simultaneously the end of what he calls the Mechanical, or Gutenberg, Era, dominated by movable type and later mechanical forms, and the birth pangs of the new and entirely different Electric Age, which he sometimes calls the Age of Circuitry, or of Information. As his books The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media explain, the change is the most traumatic since the transition 9,000 years ago, from the paleolithic culture to the neolithic, from hunting to agriculture.

The change, says McLuhan, is making movable type obsolete and with it books, newspapers, magazines–in fact all kinds of printed matter, including the sentence you are now reading. We will also have to junk the by-products of the Gutenberg invention which, says, McLuhan, have created our culture’s visual, literary, detached, linear approach to life. This dooms a lot more linear by-products than you might think, including railways, clotheslines, stocking seams, the grid system in city planning and stag lines at dances. Even points of view must go–”because it’s no longer possible to take a fixed position for more than a single moment.” So must jobs, which are fragmentary in nature and do not suit the new age in which people crave roles with depth involvement.•

“We Tend To Be Ethical Only When Our Survival, And That Of Those We Care About, Is Not At Stake”

April 14, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m sure reading moral philosopher Peter Singer’s classic book Practical Ethics played some role in my giving up eating and wearing animals. In a new Reddit AMA, which is tied to the publication of his latest title, The Most Good You Can Do, Singer assesses the correct responses to various ethical challenges. A few exchanges below.

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Question:

What are your thoughts on a universal basic income?

Peter Singer:

Nice idea, but it would need to be truly universal, i.e. I’d like to see everyone in the world have a guaranteed minimum that would mean that no one was unable to buy enough food to live. Unfortunately, I can’t see this being implemented in the near future, so in The Most Good You Can Do I focus on action that is cost-effective and practical right now.

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Question:

Do you think that it’s wrong to buy lamb and beef that has come from sheep and cattle that have lived non-factory farmed lives outdoors in fields? It’s seems to me that the lives of such animals are worth living, i.e. that the world is better off for containing such animals than not, and therefore (from an animal welfare perspective at least) it is good and right to buy lamb and beef from these sources; this would not preclude simultaneously compaigning for improved treatment of these animals. Do you agree?

Peter Singer:

The lives of sheep and cows kept on grass rather than in feedlots may be worth living, but unfortunately these ruminants produce a lot of methane (essentially, belching and farting) and so make a big contribution to climate change. Despite the myth of this being “natural” grass-fed beef and lamb, on the scale on which we are producing it, is simply not sustainable.

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Question:

In an interview you did with Tyler Cowen back when you wrote The Life You Can Save, you were asked what you think about immigration as an anti-poverty tool. At the time you said you need to think about it more. It seems to me that allowing more immigration may be the most effective political change we can make toward reducing poverty, so I’m curious if you’ve spent more time on that question since then and have an opinion on it?

Peter Singer:

Yes, I’ve thought about it some more, and looked at some of the arguments in favor of Open Borders. To me, though, the problem is that any political party that advocated this would lose the next election, and that election contest would probably bring out all the racist elements in society in a very nasty way. So until people in affluent nations are much more accepting of large-scale immigration than they are now, in any country that I am familiar with, I don’t think a large increase in immigrants from developing nations is feasible.

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Question:

I recently completed my PhD in philosophy, but throughout grad school, I have become completely disillusioned with academic philosophy (no jobs, prestige-obsessed, intimidating/arrogant people, etc.). But I love philosophy very dearly, and I’ve been told I stand a decent chance at getting a postdoc. If you weren’t doing what you do now, what do you think you’d be doing? And do you think you’d have any regrets?

Peter Singer:

I suppose I might be a political activist of some kind. Back in Australia in the ’90s, I was a political candidate for the Greens. I didn’t get elected, but support for the Greens has grown since then, and Green candidates have won the Senate seat for which I stood. I’m not sorry that I lost, because it was after that that I was offered the position at Princeton that has enabled me to have a lot more influence in discussions of the issues raised both in Animal Liberation and in The Most Good You Can Do but I often wonder what my life would have been like if I’d won. (Incidentally, Australia has proportional voting for the Senate, so it’s not the case that I could have helped the worse candidate get elected, as Ralph Nader’s candidacy did in the 2000 presidential election between Bush and Gore. I would not stand as a minor party candidate under those circumstances.)

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Question:

What would you consider to be the greatest danger to a more ethical future?

Peter Singer:

We tend to be ethical only when our survival, and that of those we care about, is not at stake. One of the big present dangers to our present level of security is climate change, which could create a chaotic world with hundreds of millions of people who are unable to feed themselves, and become climate refugees, causing a chaotic world.

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Question:

Would you rather save the life of 1 horse-size duck or 100 duck-size horses?

Peter Singer: 

An effective altruist would always prefer to save 100 lives rather than just one.•

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“We Absolutely Never Spoke About The Treatments, Then Or Ever”

April 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I love Lou Reed’s music so much, but not a single writer I know who met him had a good word to say about the late rocker. “Asshole” was the most common descriptor. Not that he did anything awful; he was just a mean punk looking to put his unhappiness somewhere. 

The reason usually given for Reed’s aggressively surly demeanor was that he had been administered electroshock therapy as a teen. As Reed is set to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, his sister, Merrill Reed Weiner, explains in a Cuepoint piece the backstory of her family’s tortured decision to allow for the crude treatment. It was a very different time medically, with parents, especially mothers, often blamed and hectored for things not their fault, and traumatic “cures” conducted. An excerpt:

My parents were like lambs being led to the slaughter — confused, terrified, and conditioned to follow the advice of doctors. They never even got a second opinion. Told by doctors that they were to blame and that their son suffered from severe mental illness, they thought they had no choice.

I assume that Lou could not have been in any shape to really understand the treatment or the side effects. It may well be that he was fearful that he would be committed to a psychiatric hospital and not allowed to remain home if he did not agree to the treatment. Thus, informed consent from him would have been obtained in a rather questionable fashion.

Was he suicidal? Impaired by drugs? Schizophrenic? Or a victim of psychiatric incompetence and misdiagnosis? Certainly no one was talking about the impact of depression, anxiety, self-medication with illegal drugs, and what all that could do to a developing teenage brain. Nor was there any family therapy, involving us in understanding him and his needs.

My father was attempting to solve a situation that was beyond him, but it came from a deep love for Lou. My mother was terrified and certain of her own implicit guilt since they had told her this was due to her poor mothering. Each of us suffered the loss of our dear sweet Lou in our own private hell, unhelped and undercut by the medical profession. The advent of family therapy unfortunately was not yet available to us. We were captured in a moment in time.

It has been suggested by some authors that ECT was approved by my parents because Lou had confessed to homosexual urges. How simplistic. He was depressed, weird, anxious, and avoidant. My parents were many things, but homophobic they were not. In fact, they were blazing liberals. They were caught in a bewildering web of guilt, fear, and poor psychiatric care. Did they make a mistake in not challenging the doctor’s recommendation for ECT? Absolutely. I have no doubt they regretted it until the day they died. But the family secret continued. We absolutely never spoke about the treatments, then or ever.

Our family was torn apart the day they began those wretched treatments.•

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“How Does Anyone Make Money Selling A Book For A Cent?”

April 14, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

No offense to Freeman Dyson, but the book of his I just read was purchased used for a penny on Amazon (plus $3.99 for shipping and handling). I’ve always wondered why anyone would bother selling a penny title online. What volume of sales could possibly make it worth it? In a Guardian piece, Calum Marsh tries to make sense of one-cent-book sales. The opening:

Sometime in early 2013, in Dallas, Texas, a generous reader donated his impeccable first-edition copy of Philip Roth’s Our Gang to the local Goodwill store, its royal blue dust jacket gleaming as brilliantly as it did in 1971.

There it sat on a shelf, priced at $1, until a semi-trailer from Books Squared whisked it away among 3,000 other leftovers. At the Books Squared warehouse in south-west Dallas, Our Gang was checked and processed by receivers and a scrupulous quality-control team, who deemed the book “like new” before scanning it into their computer system to be sold online.

Dynamic pricing software cross-referenced every active listing of a used, like-new, hardcover copy of Our Gang across online marketplaces like Amazon and Abebooks, then matched the lowest price. Last March, four months after it was listed, I bought the book for a penny, and Books Squared shipped it to my apartment in Toronto. This handsome volume is sitting proudly on my desk right now.

Over the last year, to give you an idea of the riches for the taking, I’ve spent a penny each on Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson and Deception, Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark in hardcover, a first-edition copy of Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker, and one of Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things – among others.

Online, such literary treasures are in ample supply. But deals this good raise an obvious question. It clearly took a lot of time to usher Our Gang from the backrooms of Goodwill to Canada, where I live. So how does anyone make money selling a book for a cent?•

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“The Robotic Arms And Hands Are Capable Of Grasping Utensils”

April 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Iron chefs may truly be made from metal if Moley Robotics brings its AI cook to the market in 2017 as planned. The idea is that you call in your order on a smartphone and the machine at home can make any of 2,000 recipes (though so far it’s only perfected one: crab bisque). Who knows if the company’s robot will be ready for the kitchen in two years and if the price can really initially be kept to a not-so-modest $15,000, but this is the general direction many restaurants (and perhaps homes) are headed. From Megan Gibson at Time:

Moley, which was founded by computer scientist Mark Oleynik, has partnered with the London-based Shadow Robot Company, which developed the kitchen’s hands. Twenty motors, two dozen joints and 129 sensors are used in order to mimic the movements of human hands. The robotic arms and hands are capable of grasping utensils, pots, dishes and various bottles of ingredients. Olyenik says that the robot hands are also capable of powering through cooking tasks quickly, though they’ve been designed to move quite slowly, so as not to alarm anyone watching it work.

Sadly for vegetarians, like Shadow Robot’s managing director Rich Walker, crab bisque is the only dish the robot is currently able to make. However, the company plans to build a digital library of 2,000 recipes before the kitchen is available to the wider public. Moley ambitiously aims to scale the robot chef for mass production and begin selling them as early as 2017. The robotic chef, complete with a purpose-built kitchen, including an oven, hob, dishwasher and sink, will cost £10,000 (around $15,000). Yet that price point will depend on a relatively high demand for the kitchen and it’s still unclear how large the market is for such a product at the moment.•

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“It has created what it claims is the first robot chef.”

The kitchen of the future as presented by Walter Cronkite in 1967.

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“To Maintain The Right To Be Tax-Exempt, Religions Must Fulfill Certain Requirements”

April 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Alex Gibney details the backlash he, Lawrence Wright and others have faced from the Church of Scientology over the book and film versions of Going Clear and questions the organization’s tax-exempt status. An excerpt:

The church maintains that its activities are protected by the 1st Amendment as religious practices. Partially on that basis, the church convinced the Internal Revenue Service in 1993 that Scientology should be tax-exempt and that all donations to the church should be tax-deductible. (The film shows that the church’s method of “convincing” the IRS featured lawsuits and vilification of its agents.)

In the past, critics of the church have called for its tax exemption to be revoked because it is not a “real religion.” I agree that tax-exemption isn’t merited, but not for that reason. The Church of Scientology has a distinct belief system which, despite its somewhat strange cosmology — mocked by the TV show “South Park” and many others — is not essentially more strange than, say, the idea of a virgin birth. Scientologists are entitled to believe what they want to believe. And the IRS website makes it clear that anyone is entitled to start a religion at any time without seeking IRS permission. To maintain the right to be tax-exempt, however, religions must fulfill certain requirements for charitable organizations. For example, they may not “serve the private interests of any individual” and/or “the organization’s purposes and activities may not be illegal or violate fundamental public policy.”

On these points alone, it is hard to see why Americans should subsidize Scientology through its tax-exemption.•

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“Is There Any Chance That A Post-Apocalyptic Society Could Reboot A Technological Civilization?”

April 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

What if the wheels fell completely off, an apocalypse of some sort rained down upon us, and we had to start again sans fossil fuels? Could we rebuild a technologically advanced society without crude and coal? Could alternative energy power a new industrialized world?

In his Aeon essay, “Out of the Ashes,” astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell tries to the answer these questions and doesn’t come away completely reassured. Two interesting potential solutions: charcoal and wood gases. The opening:

Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. The vast majority of the human race perishes. Our civilisation collapses. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of bandits looting and taking by force.

Bad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity. We bounce back. Sooner or later, peace and order emerge again, just as they have time and again through history. Stable communities take shape. They begin the agonising process of rebuilding their technological base from scratch. But here’s the question: how far could such a society rebuild? Is there any chance, for instance, that a post-apocalyptic society could reboot a technological civilisation?

Let’s make the basis of this thought experiment a little more specific. Today, we have already consumed the most easily drainable crude oil and, particularly in Britain, much of the shallowest, most readily mined deposits of coal. Fossil fuels are central to the organisation of modern industrial society, just as they were central to its development. Those, by the way, are distinct roles: even if we could somehow do without fossil fuels now (which we can’t, quite), it’s a different question whether we could have got to where we are without ever having had them.

So, would a society starting over on a planet stripped of its fossil fuel deposits have the chance to progress through its own Industrial Revolution? Or to phrase it another way, what might have happened if, for whatever reason, the Earth had never acquired its extensive underground deposits of coal and oil in the first place? Would our progress necessarily have halted in the 18th century, in a pre-industrial state?

It’s easy to underestimate our current dependence on fossil fuels.•

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“His Pneumatic Features And Eerie Complexion Could Seem Repellent”

April 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We don’t know we’re ridiculous, so it hurts when someone points it out.

That harsh realization, however, is seldom enough to claim a life. Perhaps Dr. Fredric Brandt, the dermatologist to the stars known as the “Baron of Botox,” was really so deeply wounded by Martin Short’s cutting Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt caricature of his Bond villain otherworldliness that it pushed him to suicide, but it was likely more complicated. Dr. Brandt had long suffered from bouts of depression (perhaps stemming from his orphaned childhood or some biochemical origin) and was said to be no stranger to loneliness. He probably wanted to fix himself on the inside where it hurt, but he had to settle for working on his face, trying to force his lips upward into a smile. From the Economist:

He liked to call himself a sculptor of faces. But he did not cut or chisel. That was the work of the plastic surgeons who had pioneered beauty treatment, sawing away outsize noses and tightening withered skin over unforgiving cheekbones, via a general anaesthetic, scars and bruising. He did not criticise his sawbones colleagues, but he thought his own countenance showed that the needle worked better than the knife. Visitors sceptical of his strangely smooth skin would be invited to check behind his ears for the telltale signs of a facelift.

Some thought his strange appearance exemplified the cost of battling the years. His pneumatic features and eerie complexion could seem repellent: an alien doctor from a visiting starship, perhaps. Others thought his wispy blond hair and fair skin might be a sign of Scandinavian roots. He laughed at that: he was a Jewish orphan whose parents had run a confectionery shop in Newark; his appearance was a triumph, just like his career.

Critics muttered that the “Skincare Svengali”, (as Vogue dubbed him, appreciatively), was engaged in a nightmarish science project, making a fortune from human weakness. Better, surely to grow old gracefully and naturally. But his patients saw it differently. They wanted to feel better about themselves, to remember the people they had been—and to stay competetive in a society that prizes only youthful beauty. Laurin Sydney, a television journalist, said he helped her extend her career 18 years after her “sell-by date”. Madonna told the New York Times: “If I have nice skin, I owe a lot to him.”•

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“Until 2008, Cubans Were Banned From Buying Their Own Computers”

April 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Computers, let alone smartphones, are anything but ubiquitous in Cuba, so it would seem Airbnb would have an impossible task setting up shop. Not so. There was a preexisting infrastructure the company tapped into once the embargo was lifted. From Sarah Kessler at Fast Company:

Airbnb had previously blocked would-be Cuban hosts from listing on its site. Now, it was about to become legal for them to do so.

The hurdles were not small: In 2011, the country’s National Statistics Office and theInternational Telecommunication Union estimated that about 22% of Cubans have Internet access, but that included people who only had access to a government-controlled Intranet. Until 2008, Cubans were banned from buying their own computers. Meanwhile, having a bank account is uncommon. “It’s not just that people prefer cash,” says [Baruch Professor Ted] Henken, “It’s almost the only way. People don’t trust anything else, at least not yet.”

Thankfully for Airbnb, however, it didn’t have to start from scratch. It simply tapped into an existing network of middlemen.

The company partnered with a handful of what it describes as “Internet cafes for hosting” that were already facilitating bookings online. These small businesses already had connections with most of the homes for rent on the island, and already charged them a fee for management services. Now they will handle Airbnb listings. Even for hosts who have bank accounts, Airbnb needs to work with intermediaries to deposit funds into their accounts. For the many hosts without access to bank accounts, it partnered with third parties who, in some cases, will deliver cash to their doorsteps (Henken says Airbnb is likely using an established money transfer service to handle payments to unbanked hosts, Airbnb declined specify who’s providing the service for them). All of these are informal partnerships.

Airbnb taught these middlemen how to use the website, and helped them add information. “Maybe they didn’t have high-quality photographs in their homes,” Airbnb’s [Molly] Turner says. “Maybe their availability was written on paper and not kept online anywhere. Our team did a lot of work behind the scenes talking to hosts and making sure that the information was up to date and current.”•

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“In This Century A First Cohort Of Adventurous Humans Will Probably Cut The Umbilical And Live Off-Earth”

April 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

The sun is dying, and I’m not feeling so great myself.

Unless we figure out a clever way to “fix” our star, we’re going to have to get off spaceship Earth at some point, moving to Mars or Titan or elsewhere. That’s the only way our species can survive (though our species will be completely different by then).

In a Salon piece, astronomer Chris Impey presents a passage from his latest book, Beyond: Our Future In Space, which looks at many facets of space colonization, from law to sex to evolution to transhumanism. An excerpt:

A mass exodus from Earth is implausible. After all, it costs $50 billion just to send a dozen people to the Moon for a few days. Elon Musk may claim he’ll reduce the price of a trip to Mars to $500,000, which is a hundred thousand times less, but that seems unlikely at the moment. If the Earth becomes contaminated or inhospitable, we’ll have to live in bubble domes, fix it, or suffer through it. Nonetheless, in this century a first cohort of adventurous humans will probably cut the umbilical and live off-Earth. What issues will they face?

Beyond survival, their first issue is their legal status. As we’ve seen, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty addresses ownership. According to Article II, “Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” That seems transparent, but it doesn’t mention the rights of individuals. Bas Lansdorp, the CEO of Mars One, said his legal experts looked into the treaty. He thinks that “what goes for governments also goes for individuals in those governments.” If Mars One achieves its goal, thirty people will settle the red planet by 2023; the gradually expanding settlement will use more and more Martian land. Lansdorp insists that their goal isn’t ownership. “It is allowed to use land, just not to say that you own it,” he says. “It is also allowed to use resources that you need for your mission. Don’t forget that a lot of these rules were made long ago, when a human mission to Mars was not within reach.”

Some space players claim altruistic motives, but none of them can succeed without revenue to fuel their dreams. What happens when profit is the only goal?

Large multinational corporations are bound by international trade law, but they could plausibly argue that they have the right to use, even to exhaust, the resources of an extraterrestrial body. A government that wanted to appropriate land on the Moon or Mars might withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty, and it’s unlikely it would suffer any serious -consequences. Even Mars One exists in a legal limbo. Bas Lansdorp needs to fund his $6 billion mission: “Imagine how many people would be interested in a grain of sand from the New World!”

At some point, the debate will stop being hypothetical.•

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Carl Sagan waxing philosophically about the need for humans to eventually colonize space, to curl up like newborns on comets and fly like birds on Titan, going on after the sun dies but before the universe does.

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“It’s The ‘Biggest Thing’ Going ‘Since At Least The Hoover Dam'”

April 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Chemical reactions, unlike silicon chips, are unmoved by Moore’s Law. That’s why battery improvement is frustratingly slow. Perhaps Elon Musk’s gigafactory in the Reno desert will move the stubborn arrow somewhat.

The Nevada city has its own reasons for going into business with the Tesla founder. Famous for its boom-or-bust cycles and caught up in the latter end of that bargain since the collapse of the housing market, Reno is hoping to become a Silicon Valley outpost, using taxes to subsidize the factory at the rate of $190,000 per job it will create. It’s yet another gamble in the city’s history of wagers. From Jonathan O’Connell at the Washington Post:

The Tesla deal is one of the nation’s top economic development prizes in a decade. In Nevada, one lawmaker told Reuters, it’s the “biggest thing” going “since at least the Hoover Dam.” Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and state lawmakers project that over 20 years it will create 20,000 jobs and generate $100 billion for the state, which suffered in the recession.

But the agreement also comes at a time when economists and academics are questioning the wisdom of making big-ticket bets on single companies.

For all the promises of jobs and growth, Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, says the company isn’t likely to be profitable until 2020, when he hopes to sell 500,000 cars a year. Tesla reported last week that it sold a record 10,030 cars in the first quarter.

The match of America’s buzzy electric carmaker with a town whose best-known industry features weathered casinos would be less stark if Northern Nevada was already a hotbed of engineering or advanced manufacturing.

It is not. …

Reno’s biography is one of booms and busts: silver-mining in the 1850s, divorces a half-century later, casinos beginning in the 1930s and housing during the real estate bubble, fueled by cheap land and easy mortgages.

Nevada was dragged low by the housing crash and recession, leading to an unemployment rate of 13.7 percent late in 2010, four points above the national average. As of January it still had the highest joblessness rate of any state, at 7.1 percent.

The arrival of the stock market darling has created optimism among locals that Reno could be an outpost of Silicon Valley, anchored by Lake Tahoe and the Burning Man festival. The median price of a single-family home is one-third that of the Bay Area. It boasts more than 300 days of sunshine, and locals brag about hitting the slopes nearby 30 minutes after work. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently tweeted about his ride through the mountains to Reno — in a Tesla, of course.•

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“I Missed My Lunch Period Because I Was Doing Neuroscouting”

April 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Marvelous Mookie Betts was selected by the Boston Red Sox as the 172nd pick of the 2011 draft in part because of the new science of neuroscouting, research that aims to go far beyond traditional evaluations. From Alex Speier of the Boston Globe:

“He wasn’t a typical high school stud,” said Theo Epstein, the former Red Sox general manager and current Cubs president of baseball operations. “He’s an undersized kid. It’s really the athleticism and actions that drew us to him. Danny really believed in him.

“Through further evaluations and some of the proprietary testing we developed over the years, it was really clear that this kid not only had the speed, not only had the athleticism, not only had the arm, not only had the feel for the game, but also was pretty elite in his hand-eye coordination, his reaction time, and the way his mind worked as well.”

What, exactly, does Epstein mean about the workings of Betts’s mind?

“I can’t talk about that stuff,” he laughed, “because then I’d have to kill you.”

That “stuff,” according to several sources familiar with the Sox’ scouting efforts with Betts, was a new effort in 2011 to have prospects take part in neuroscouting tests.

For years, pitch recognition has been a great separator when scouting amateur players. Given that a high schooler might never see a fastball that cracks 90 miles per hour or be challenged by a legitimate major league breaking ball, there is significant guesswork in determining whether apparent bat speed will translate to production against top pitching in the pros.

In an attempt to crack that mystery, the Sox started instructing their area scouts to put potential draftees through a series of computer exercises meant to measure reaction time to pitches. Betts became a heralded part of that pilot program.

“I missed my lunch period because I was doing neuroscouting,” recalled Betts. “[Watkins] just said, ‘Do this, don’t think about the results.’ I did what I could. It was just like, a ball popped up, tap space bar as fast as you could. If the seams were one way, you tapped it. If it was the other way, you weren’t supposed to tap it. I was getting some of them wrong.

“I wasn’t getting frustrated, but I was like, ‘Dang, this is hard.’ ”•

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“Kana Was A Wiccan, Feminist Attorney, And I Was Clearly The First Black Person She Knew”

April 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Bylined at Gawker to a writer named Teller Red is “My Time Living in a New York City Commune,” an account of modern-day collective life in the nation’s most vibrant urban center. These communes have always existed in NYC despite being thought of as more rural or small-town entities situated where real estate is cheaper. The need for togetherness and structure overcomes the inhospitable market factors, at least for a while. An excerpt:

Kana was a Wiccan, feminist attorney, and I was clearly the first black person she knew. Over the three plus years we spent as housemates, we battled often, our mutual defenses and stereotypes clashing, but our respect and friendship became stronger. She had zero problem speaking truth to power, and took pride in her ability to solve problems.

“You know that’s why you’re always fighting, right?” I told her once as she stirred her coffee in our kitchen. “Because you feel useless if you aren’t a savior, so you create shit to fix.” It wasn’t the equivalent of her swooping in to rescue me from, and later school me about, known community predators, but she confessed it made her think about her reputation around the houses as something of a troublemaker.

Perhaps it was her consideration of this possibility that kept her mostly silent the one day I needed her to challenge authority most. It started because I’d baked a cake to bring to dinner one night, sliced it, then ventured to the bathroom before heading across the street to the dining room. When I exited the bathroom, Tina—a community vet who was new to our particular house—was at the stove cooking, and half the cake was gone. I knew no one could have eaten it that quickly (she had!), so I laughed and asked, “Ok, who hid half the cake?” Tina’s face instantly matched her box-red hair as she took the plate the cake was on, dumped it in the trash, and stormed out, yelling that she was about to get my ass kicked out.

The community had few official rules, but no violence or “non-negotiable negativity” were tolerated. People could be as loopy as they wanted, but if called on something that infringed on someone else’s comfort, they had to be open to discussing and resolving it. These concepts neatly underscored another community must: commitment to non-judgment. I saw this concept beautifully mastered and modeled by a few in the core group (the 20 or so members who committed to share their finances, and were responsible for planning the day-to-day running of the community). They really were able to separate an act from a person’s value, something I’d never witnessed or experienced. It was the example that helped me navigate through the many times an otherwise decent person made a spectacularly stupid or racist comment. It was difficult for me to suspend personal judgment when I felt someone was so clearly fucking wrong, but being the recipient of the unconditional positive regard some of them showed me was profoundly moving, and it remains a gift I strive to give in all my relationships. On this day, it was Tina’s behavior that was least in line with the rules, so I was hardly worried when our exchange became the subject of a community session to discuss and resolve the cake-trashing incident.

The meeting was presided over by Tato, a Napoleanic core member who remains, to this day, the most arrogant, condescending asshole I’ve ever met in my life.•

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“The Key To His Success Was His Relentless Customer Focus”

April 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

If things had broken differently, Robert Schuller might have sold something other than God.

The recently deceased Christian televangelist knew how to market. He was a Mad Man with keen psychological insight who realized that a Philip Johnson-designed cathedral made of glass would stand for something in a modern world of shifting ethics and allegiances, when we had become individuals unmoored from a sense of community–when we were alone. We belonged to the free market now and he would use that same market to provide us with a sense of “healing.” Which isn’t to say that Schuller lacked true faith, but that his belief in entrepreneurship was as robust as it was for the Lord.

From an Economist piece about the “pastorpreneur”:

The key to his success was his relentless customer focus. In a 1983 interview with the Los Angeles Times he described his Crystal Cathedral as a “22-acre shopping centre for Jesus Christ” and called himself a “religious retailer”. Just as a good shopping centre should provide everything from groceries to shoes, so a good megachurch should provide everything from Bible studies to dance classes, he argued; and just as a retailer should know his customer, so a pastorpreneur should know his flock. He conducted regular surveys of his audience and, more important, the people he wasn’t reaching. (“There are still a heck of a lot of people out there overdosing, blowing their brains out and getting herpes.”) He recognised that the precondition for success in retailing of any kind, spiritual or secular, was good parking.

His sermons also conformed to his belief in giving the audience what they wanted. He recognised that the fire-and-brimstone preaching of the old Evangelicals had limited appeal in a world of McDonald’s and Disneyland. He preached a different Protestantism, that owed as much to Norman Vincent Peale, the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking”, as it did to Martin Luther. “The classical error of historical Christianity is that we have never started with the value of the person,” he wrote in his book, “Self-Esteem: The New Reformation”.

He added three other elements into this customer-friendly formula. Economies of scale helped him reduce the costs of reaching a bigger audience; the “Hour of Power” made him the world’s most widely watched preacher. He knew that the first rule of marketing is to hold people’s attention; so he built his cathedral from glass, installed one of the best organs in the world and invited a constant stream of celebrities, including presidents and film stars. And he understood cross-promotion: his bestselling books promoted his church services, and vice versa.•

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“Imagine A World Where Whole Epochs Will Pass, Cultures Rise And Fall, Between A Telephone Call And A Reply”

April 12, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve just started reading Imagined Worlds, the 1997 Freeman Dyson entry in the Jerusalem-Harvard Lecture series. It’s something of a summation speech of Dyson’s remarkable–and sometimes perplexing–career, even though he is thankfully still with us and still thinking. If you’re vaguely familiar, it’s the book with the tag line “Imagine a world where whole epochs will pass, cultures rise and fall, between a telephone call and a reply.” Telephone calls, remember those?

I mention it because Imagined Worlds is one of the 76 choices Stewart Brand included on his 2014 Brainpickings reading list of books to “sustain and rebuild humanity.” The first 20 choices:

  1. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery
  2. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  3. The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
  4. The Iliad by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
  5. The Memory of the World: The Treasures That Record Our History from 1700 BC to the Present Day by UNESCO
  6. The History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
  7. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories edited by Robert B. Strassler
  8. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War edited by Robert B. Strassler
  9. The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volumes 1-4 edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore
  10. The Prince by Machiavelli, translated by George Bull, published by Folio Society
  11. The Nature of Things by Lucretius
  12. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz
  13. The Way Life Works: The Science Lover’s Illustrated Guide to How Life Grows, Develops, Reproduces, and Gets Along by Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson
  14. Venice, A Maritime Republic by Frederic Chapin Lane
  15. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
  16. The Map Book by Peter Barber
  17. Conceptual Physics by Paul G. Hewitt
  18. The Encyclopedia of Earth: A Complete Visual Guide by Michael Allaby and Dr. Robert Coenraads
  19. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
  20. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

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“Packages Are Already Soaring Through The Air In China”

April 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s likely America won’t much longer get to choose its timetable for proceeding with delivery drones, not if the robotic vehicles fill the skies in China. Our superpower rival is still delivering a small number of packages each day in this new manner, but it has the regulatory room to expand rapidly. From Carl Engelking at Discover:

While companies like Amazon are chomping at the bit to launch drone delivery services in the United States, packages are already soaring through the air in China.

Two years ago, residents in the city of Dongguang spotted experimental SF Express-branded delivery drones hovering overhead with packages in tow. SF Express is the country’s largest mail carrier, and it presently delivers roughly 500 packages a day via drone. Now, the company says it plans to expand its services and double the number a packages it sends each day, according to a Chinese news report.

The state of drone couriers in China couldn’t contrast more with the situation here in the United States.

Opening the Skies

SF Express deploys octocopters that can carry about six pounds, so they’re only used for small express deliveries. In China, commercial drone use is legal; businesses simply need to get authorization from aviation authorities regarding the type of drone being used. Retailer Alibaba is also experimenting with delivering teas via drone in China.•

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“He Is A Fictional Character, And I Invented Him”

April 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

You don’t read anything like Joseph Mitchell’s articles in the New Yorker anymore because that New York City no longer exists. Of course, even back during the ’30, ’40s and ’50s, it didn’t completely exist.

In the early and middle parts of last century, there was a lot more lassitude in regards to what was printed as fact, and Mitchell certainly wasn’t above employing poetic license when weaving one of his unforgettable narratives. Janet Malcolm, a fellow New Yorker scribe, though one of a different and more veracious era, writes in the NYRB about Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell bio, Man in Profile. An excerpt:

Mitchell studied at the University of North Carolina without graduating and came to New York in 1929, at the age of twenty-one. Kunkel traces the young exile’s rapid rise from copy boy on the New York World to reporter on the Herald Tribune and feature writer on The World Telegram. In 1933 St. Clair McKelway, the managing editor of the eight-year-old New Yorker, noticed Mitchell’s newspaper work and invited him to write for the magazine; in 1938 the editor, Harold Ross, hired him. In 1931 Mitchell married a lovely woman of Scandinavian background named Therese Jacobson, a fellow reporter, who left journalism to become a fine though largely unknown portrait and street photographer. She and Mitchell lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village and raised two daughters, Nora and Elizabeth. Kunkel’s biography is sympathetic and admiring and discreet. If any of the erotic secrets that frequently turn up in the nets of biographers turned up in Kunkel’s, he does not reveal them. He has other fish to gut.

From reporting notes, journals, and correspondence, and from three interviews Mitchell gave late in life to a professor of journalism named Norman Sims, Kunkel extracts a picture of Mitchell’s journalistic practice that he doesn’t know quite what to do with. On the one hand, he doesn’t regard it as a pretty picture; he uses terms like “license,” “latitude,” “dubious technique,” “tactics,” and “bent journalistic rules” to describe it. On the other, he reveres Mitchell’s writing, and doesn’t want to say anything critical of it even while he is saying it. So a kind of weird embarrassed atmosphere hangs over the passages in which Kunkel reveals Mitchell’s radical departures from factuality.

It is already known that the central character of the book Old Mr. Flood, a ninety-three-year-old man named Hugh G. Flood, who intended to live to the age of 115 by eating only fish and shellfish, did not exist, but was a “composite,” i.e., an invention. Mitchell was forced to characterize him as such after readers of theNew Yorker pieces from which the book was derived tried to find the man. “Mr. Flood is not one man,” Mitchell wrote in an author’s note to the book, and went on, “Combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past.” In the Up in the Old Hotelcollection he simply reclassified the work as fiction.

Now Kunkel reveals that another Mitchell character—a gypsy king named Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the subject of a New Yorker profile published in 1942—was also an invention. How Kunkel found this out is rather funny. He came upon a letter that Mitchell wrote in 1961 to The New Yorker’s lawyer, Milton Greenstein, asking Greenstein for legal advice on how to stop a writer named Sidney Sheldon from producing a musical about gypsy life based on Mitchell’s profile of Nikanov and a subsequent piece about the scams of gypsy women. Mitchell was himself working on a musical adaptation of his gypsy pieces—it eventually became the show Bajour, named after one of the gypsy women’s cruelest scams, that came to Broadway in 1964 and ran for around six months—and was worried about Sheldon’s competing script.

“Cockeye Johnny Nikanov does not exist in real life, and never did,” Mitchell told Greenstein. Therefore “no matter how true to life Cockeye Johnny happens to be, he is a fictional character, and I invented him, and he is not in ‘the public domain,’ he is mine.” Mitchell’s Gilbertian logic evidently prevailed—Sheldon gave up his musical. But the secret of Johnny Nikanov’s wobbly ontological status—though Greenstein kept quiet about it—had passed out of Mitchell’s possession. It now belonged to tattling posterity, the biographer’s best friend.•

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“He Argues That We Are Now Starting To Understand ‘The Software Of Life'”

April 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I wish Ray Kurzweil would live forever, but I fear he won’t make it.

Like almost everyone reading this (and writing it!), the brilliant inventor and futurist will likely die sometime in the twenty-first century. Kurzweil hopes to defy the odds–defy death itself–by taking a regimen of supplements which cost thousands of dollars a day, hoping he will remain alive and healthy until technology can make him immortal in one fashion or another. A passage from a new profile of the Googler by Caroline Daniel of the Financial Times:

Though the 67-year-old Kurzweil looks fresh-faced (he uses antioxidant skin cream daily), he is ageing, even if his “biological age comes out in the late forties. It hasn’t moved that much.”

But this is peanuts compared with Kurzweil’s ultimate goal: to live for ever. That means staying healthy enough to get to what he dubs “Bridge Two, when the biotechnology revolution will reprogramme our inherited biology”, and “Bridge Three”: molecular nanotechnology enabling us to rebuild our bodies.

Radical life extension has been on Kurzweil’s mind for decades. Today such sci-fi heroics to save mankind from death are being embraced by Silicon Valley’s tech elite. Billionaires such as Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, call death “the great enemy”; death is no longer seen as inevitable but as the latest evil to be “disrupted”. Google, too, has created a separate venture, Calico, to combat ageing. “I had a discussion two years ago with the head of Google Ventures about longevity. It resulted in Calico. I’m an adviser.

“I think every death is tragic. We’ve learnt to accept it, the cycle of life and all that, but humans have an opportunity to transcend beyond natural limitations. Life expectancy was 19 a thousand years ago. It was 37 in 1800. Everyone believes in life extension. Somebody comes out with a cure for disease, it’s celebrated. It’s not, ‘Oh, gee, that’s going to forestall death.’ ”

A scientist in Newsweek magazine in 2009 mocked Kurzweil, saying his was “the most public mid-life crisis” ever. “These are ad hominem attacks. There’s what I call ‘death-ist’ philosophy of people who celebrate death,” he responds.

Kurzweil claims the fundamental mistake his critics make is in believing progress is linear. This is his key thesis: “The reality of information technology is it progresses exponentially . . . 30 steps linearly gets you to 30. One, two, three, four, step 30 you’re at 30. With exponential growth, it’s one, two, four, eight. Step 30, you’re at a billion.”

If medical progress might once have been a hit and miss affair, he argues that we are now starting to understand “the software of life.”•

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“I’m Going To Wake Up The Robots”

April 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Wearables will soon be small enough that you’ll forget you’re wearing them, and you’ll have no idea who else is. They’ll have many great applications and will improve life, but I bet there’ll be times when we long for the dorky obviousness of Google Glass. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shows off the button-sized Curie Module, available in the second half of 2015, by “conducting” a group of robot spiders.

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“Demystify The End Of Print”

April 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some in what is still called the newspaper industry remain hopeful print will have an extended senescence. At least another decade or several more. How can you blame them? That’s still the way they collect most of the revenue. But that’s unlikely. The only two exit strategies would seem to be papers that aggressively (and successfully) transfer to digital-only and those valuable enough to be snapped up by deep-pocketed media companies or technologists who can help them ease their way across this scary expanse. The good news, I think, is that people are always going to want information. The bad is that right now the blueprint for success isn’t close to completed. Even the New York Times–especially New York Times?–has seemed for several years a candidate to be sold to one of the Bloombergs of the world. 

In a message to the talented Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, media analyst Clay Shirky predicts the death will not be gradual but will speed up and slow down and speed up anew. He also offers four suggestions to the flagging industry. The fourth one, labeled “the most important piece of the puzzle,” seems a stretch to me, an uneasy mixture of patronage and profits. An excerpt:

I asked Mr. Shirky what he thought news organizations, or specifically The Times, should do, given his prognosis. And we had a long exchange about that — too much for here and now.  But I’ll summarize his main points:

1) Demystify the end of print. (“Constant speculation does no one any good, but nor does the fantasy that this is anything but hospice care.”)

2) Do more to cut costs, companywide. (“The most valuable long-term dollar to an organization with declining revenues is a dollar you don’t spend.”)

3) Give huge emphasis to finding new advertising dollars from mobile-device readership. (“The catastrophe of believing that the iPad would bring full-page, glossy, high-margin brand-building to the Internet was perhaps the cruelest trick Steve Jobs ever played on the media industry, already a long list.”)

4) Think of subscribership as membership. In short, get some percentage of the loyal readers of The Times to pay more — some of them a lot more — to support what Mr. Shirky calls their “indispensable paper.” This is the most important piece of the puzzle, he believes.•

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