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“What Does It Mean For Us As People To See The Traditional Town Square Go Digital?”

October 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google does many great things, but its corporate leaders want you to trust them with your private information–because they are the good guys–and you should never trust any corporation with such material. The thing is, it’s increasingly difficult to opt out of the modern arrangement, algorithms snaking their way into all corners of our lives. The excellent documentarian Eugene Jarecki has penned a Time essay about Google and Wikileaks and what the two say about the future. An excerpt follows.

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I interviewed notorious Wikileaks founder Julian Assange by hologram, beamed in from his place of asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. News coverage the next day focused in one way or another on the spectacular and mischievous angle that Assange had, in effect, managed to escape his quarantine and laugh in the face of those who wish to extradite him by appearing full-bodied in Nantucket before a packed house of exhilarated conference attendees.

Beyond the spectacle, though, what got less attention was what the interview was actually about, namely the future of our civilization in an increasingly digital world. What does it mean for us as people to see the traditional town square go digital, with online banking displacing bricks and mortar, just as email did snail mail, Wikipedia did the local library, and eBay the mom and pop shop? The subject of our ever-digitizing lives is one that has been gaining currency over the past year, fueled by news stories about Google Glasses, self-driving cars, sky-rocketing rates of online addiction and, most recently, the scandal of NSA abuse. But the need to better understand the implications of our digital transformation was further underscored in the days preceding the event with the publication of two books: one by Assange and the other by Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt.

Assange’s book, When Google Met Wikileaks, is the transcript (with commentary by Assange) of a secret meeting between the two that took place on June 23, 2011, when Schmidt visited Assange in England. In his commentary, Assange explores the troubling implications of Google’s vast reach, including its relationships with international authorities, particularly in the U.S., of which the public is largely unaware. Schmidt’s book, How Google Works, is a broader, sunnier look at how technology has presumably shifted the balance of power from companies to people. It tells the story of how Google rose from a nerdy young tech startup to become a nerdy behemoth astride the globe. Read together, the two books offer an unsettling portrait both of our unpreparedness for what lies ahead and of the utopian spin with which Google (and others in the digital world) package tomorrow. While Assange’s book accuses Google of operating as a kind of “‘Don’t Be Evil’ empire,” Schmidt’s book fulfills Assange’s worst fears, presenting pseudo-irreverent business maxims in an “aw shucks” tone that seems willfully ignorant of the inevitable implications of any company coming to so sweepingly dominate our lives in unprecedented and often legally uncharted ways.•

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“I Think Eventually People Will Build Sleeper Cars That Can Do An Overnight Trip”

October 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Wall Street Journal interview conducted by Laura Hedli, Google driverless-car consultant Brad Templeton ponders how these new vehicles will be sold to the public. An excerpt:

“WSJ:

How will this car be sold to people?

Brad Templeton:

You might sell it to people for a monthly fee. Plus they would have to pay per mile for gasoline, and to some extent, insurance and maintenance.

You also can sell this per mile like a taxi, except it would be much cheaper because 60% of the cost of running a taxi is the driver. It will basically be a cheap Uber [which allows a person to hail a private car or ride-share from a mobile phone], and with no need to talk to the driver.

WSJ:

If autonomous cars operated using a service model, as opposed to ownership, what will people pay per ride?

Brad Templeton: 

It will start somewhere between 50 cents and a buck. I think it could even get [to be] less than 50 cents a ride, but it won’t start cheaper.

For people who are going to make light use of it, then the per-mile price, rather than the monthly price, might actually be a good thing. Seniors stop buying cars because they don’t really feel like trading in anymore, and they cut their mileage by quite a bit.

WSJ:

Looking further down the road, what might we see in the self-driving market?

Brad Templeton: 

I think eventually people will build sleeper cars that can do an overnight trip. I don’t think it’s a very green vision, but you would probably be able to hire a car that doesn’t even have seats. It’s just got a bed. Get into it, lie down, and then eight hours later you wake up and you’re 400-500 miles away.”

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“Even When There’s Money In Writing, There’s Not Much Money”

October 13, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Somebody makes money from book sales, but those people, most of them, are not writers. Plenty of authors actually lose money publishing their titles, having to pay their own expenses and taxes. At The Popcorn Chronicles, novelist Patrick Wensink reveals the earnings for his Amazon bestseller, Broken Piano for President, and they truly are revealing. An excerpt:

“Even when there’s money in writing, there’s not much money.

I was reminded of a single page in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; specifically, the section where Dave Eggers breaks down his $100,000 advance on sales from his publisher. He then lists all his expenses. In the end the author banked a little less than half. It wasn’t bad money — just not the ‘I bet Dave Eggers totally owns a Jaguar’-type of income I expected. I mean, his name was on the cover of a book! He must be rich.

That honesty was refreshing and voyeuristic. I always said if I ever had a chance, I’d make a similar gesture. As a person learning about writing and publishing, there was something helpful about Eggers’ transparency. So here is my stab at similar honesty: the sugar bowls full of cocaine, bathtubs full of whiskey, semi-nude bookstore employees scattered throughout my bedroom tale of bestseller riches.

This is what it’s like, financially, to have the indie book publicity story of the year and be near the top of the bestseller list.

Drum roll.

$12,000.

Hi-hat crash.

I just started getting my royalty checks from July the other day (the publishing industry is slow like that). From what I can tell so far, I made about $12,000 from Broken Piano sales. That comes directly to me without all those pesky taxes taken out yet (the IRS is helpful like that).

Don’t get me wrong; as a guy with a couple of books out on an independent publisher I never thought I’d see that kind of money. Previously, my largest royalty check was about $153. I’m thrilled and very proud to say I earned any money as a writer. That’s a miracle. It’s just not the jewel-encrusted miracle most people think bestseller bank accounts are made from.

The book sold plus or minus 4,000 copies. (The publishing industry is hazy like that. What with sales in fishy-sounding third-world countries like Germany and England.) Being on an indie press I receive a more generous royalty split than most: 50 percent after expenses were deducted.

You can do the math.”

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“When People Go Into Space They Come Back With A Different Perspective”

October 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I wish it were true that space tourists who hop aboard Virgin Galactic would return immediately wanting to help and heal the planet they (temporarily) left behind, as that venture’s Head of Mission, George Whitesides, believes, but I don’t think human beings work that way. While having more globalized travel has slowly–painfully slowly–contributed to humanity’s improvement on Earth in some ways, let’s not forget that such far-flung voyages first led not to a desire to mitigate suffering but to genocide, enslavement and predation of every kind. While Galactic won’t cause such horrors, it may be more a Disneyland effect than a remedy. From Sarah Knapton at The Telegraph:

“Promising that the first commercial flights into space will begin next Spring, Mr Whitesides, said: ‘It’s a simple observation but there is something called the overview effect, which is scientifically documented. When people go into space they come back with a different perspective and I think many of the challenges we face over the next century are essentially planetary challenges and so we need to have that planetary perspective to solve them

‘So I think we are going to have tens of thousands of people who are leaders in their community coming back and bringing that planetary perspective with them. I think that perspective is really important to solving some of our biggest problems on Earth.’

That may be a bold promise, but it is one to which Mr Whitesides – and his boss – appear committed.

‘I truly feel that the things we are doing at Galactic are going to be very important for the future of the world, for the future of humanity,’ he said, speaking to The Sunday Telegraph to mark the 10th anniversary of the project.

That grand, almost spiritual, vision is being reflected in something very concrete, the design of the inside of the SpaceShipTwo craft currently being developed to shoot its passengers into space and back.

The spacecraft’s cabin – being designed by Adam Wells, who was responsible for the first-class cabin of Virgin Atlantic – will be beautiful but utterly minimal, so as not to detract from the passenger’s view of the Earth below.”

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“It’s All The Suppliers Into The Industry Who, In The Fullness Of Time, Will Gain The Power”

October 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Software companies were bigger winners than their hardware counterparts during the personal-computing boom, and it’s worth wondering whether the same will be true of driverless cars. For instance, Google seems to have no interest in being an auto manufacturer (beyond prototypes) but is desperate to come up with the software for robocars that can be sold to other outfits. And what of companies that supply sensors and such, will they likewise be the true victors? From Chris Bryant and Andy Sharman of the Financial Times:

“Who will build the self-driving car of the future?

Fired-up by Google’s driverless prototype, carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Volvo are already testing autonomous vehicles on public roads.

But the advanced sensors and electronics that form the building blocks of self-driving cars are often made by suppliers, not the car manufacturer.

Some fear that, in the long term, carmakers that lag behind in autonomous vehicle technology face a future akin to today’s PC assemblers – with the big profits accruing to the companies behind the software and electronic content underneath.

‘It’s all the suppliers into the industry who, in the fullness of time, will gain the power,’ says a senior industry analyst, who works closely with the leading carmakers. ‘If I’m the buyer, I don’t care if it’s a 1.9-litre car or a 2.4 – because I’m not driving it.'”

 

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“They Are Useless. They Can Only Give You Answers.”

October 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The excellent comic Aziz Ansari has a bit in which he talks about the way we’ve grown overdependent on Google, doing mindless searches for things like “the best toothbrush,” when we were perfectly capable of buying a toothbrush before search engines ever existed. We would just go to the store and buy a toothbrush that looked like it was good. And it always was.

Funny, yes, though I’ll argue fiercely that search engines don’t weaken our brains but give us every opportunity to improve them. (And if they’ve done the former rather than the latter, than the fault probably lies with us.) Never before have we had in our shirt pockets access to the storehouse of the world’s knowledge.

Ian Leslie’s well-considered Salon article, “Google Is Making Us All Dumber,” argues the counter, asserting that the efficiency of Google’s search has removed pretty much all of the actual search, weakening us neurologically. The piece starts with a Pablo Picasso quote about machines only being good for answers, which is amusing for its wit but also because more and more, that’s no longer true. The opening:

“In 1964, Pablo Picasso was asked by an interviewer about the new electronic calculating machines, soon to become known as computers. He replied, ‘But they are useless. They can only give you answers.’

We live in the age of answers. The ancient library at Alexandria was believed to hold the world’s entire store of knowledge. Today, there is enough information in the world for every person alive to be given three times as much as was held in Alexandria’s entire collection —and nearly all of it is available to anyone with an internet connection.

This library accompanies us everywhere, and Google, chief librarian, fields our inquiries with stunning efficiency. Dinner table disputes are resolved by smartphone; undergraduates stitch together a patchwork of Wikipedia entries into an essay. In a remarkably short period of time, we have become habituated to an endless supply of easy answers. You might even say dependent.

Google is known as a search engine, yet there is barely any searching involved anymore.”

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“We’ve Designed A System That Discards Us”

October 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

With computers so small they all but disappear, the infrastructure silently becoming more and more automated, what else will vanish from our lives and ourselves? I’m someone who loves the new normal of decentralized, free-flowing media, who thinks the gains are far greater than the losses, but it’s a question worth asking. Via Longreads, an excerpt from The Glass Cage, a new book by that Information Age designated mourner Nicholas Carr:

“There’s a big difference between a set of tools and an infrastructure. The Industrial Revolution gained its full force only after its operational assumptions were built into expansive systems and networks. The construction of the railroads in the middle of the nineteenth century enlarged the markets companies could serve, providing the impetus for mechanized mass production. The creation of the electric grid a few decades later opened the way for factory assembly lines and made all sorts of home appliances feasible and affordable. These new networks of transport and power, together with the telegraph, telephone, and broadcasting systems that arose alongside them, gave society a different character. They altered the way people thought about work, entertainment, travel, education, even the organization of communities and families. They transformed the pace and texture of life in ways that went well beyond what steam-powered factory machines had done.

The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. ‘Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,’ he wrote. ‘And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.’ It was at this point that what Hughes termed ‘technological momentum’ took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. ‘The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.’ Progress had found its groove.

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. …

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once asked, ‘Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded?’ In the business world at least, no stability in the division of work between human and computer seems in the offing. The prevailing methods of computerized communication and coordination pretty much ensure that the role of people will go on shrinking. We’ve designed a system that discards us. If unemployment worsens in the years ahead, it may be more a result of our new, subterranean infrastructure of automation than of any particular installation of robots in factories or software applications in offices. The robots and applications are the visible flora of automation’s deep, extensive, and invasive root system.”

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“If You Want To Sell A Lot Of Computers, You Have To Convince People That Information Is Terribly Important”

October 12, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Years before the World Wide Web was created and the Internet became a thing for us all, when we could all be found in a search engine, psychologist Theodore Roszak could see where things were heading: He knew the emergence of personal computers was fetishizing information and knowledge was becoming secondary. While he thought it fine that airplane reservations were computerized, he believed the algorithmic future posed a danger if info was more important than experience and morality. As he pointed out, “All men are created equal” isn’t supported by a body of fact but is as important as any linchpin of America. Of course, Roszak doesn’t mention that relying on an algorithmic-supported truth can also remove bias from an equation.

In 1986, Jeffrey Mishlove interviews Roszak about the oncoming information onslaught.

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“The Internet-Age Monopolies Are A Different Species”

October 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Many of the new corporations of the Information Age have been ostensibly good for consumers, with costs neatly hidden. For instance: Google and Facebook are completely free products, until you consider that you are the product. Amazon’s deep discounts have put all manner of cheap goods in consumers’ hands, great tools like books and tablets and smartphones, but competitors and producers have felt an increasing pinch. Eventually the earth is scorched and prices are largely in the hands of one company and the pipeline seriously shortened. Do the benefits outweigh the costs or vice versa?

In a New Republic article, Franklin Foer makes a convincing case that Amazon is already a clear monopoly, which has brought a virtual Walmartization to America. Those cheap items–Sam Walton’s or Jeff Bezos’–come at a dear price, he argues, favoring the purchaser in the short run but obliterating competitors and suppliers all the while. (And that doesn’t even begin to mention the treatment of workers who are made small so that prices can be likewise tiny.) An excerpt in which Foer looks at the disconnect between Industrial Age laws which govern monopolies and the megacorporations of the Information Age:

“Shopping on Amazon has so ingrained itself in modern American life that it has become something close to our unthinking habit, and the company has achieved a level of dominance that merits the application of a very old label: monopoly. 

That term doesn’t get tossed around much these days, but it should. Amazon is the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly that also includes Google and Walmart. Unlike U.S. Steel, the new behemoths don’t use their barely challenged power to hike up prices. They are, in fact, self-styled servants of the consumer and have ushered in an era of low prices for everything from flat-screen TVs to paper napkins to smart phones. 

In other words, we’re all enjoying the benefits of these corporations far too much to think hard about distant dangers. Besides, the ideology of Silicon Valley suggests that we have nothing much to fear: If these firms no longer engineer breathtaking technologies, they will be creatively destroyed. That’s why Peter Thiel, the creator of PayPal, has argued that the term ‘monopoly’ should be stripped of its negative connotation. A monopoly, he argues, is really nothing more than a synonym for a highly successful company. Insulation from the brutish spirit of competition even makes them superior organizations—more beneficent employers, better able to both daydream and think clearly. In Thiel’s phrasing: ‘Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.’

Thiel makes an important point: The Internet-age monopolies are a different species; they flummox our conventional ways of thinking about corporate concentration and have proved especially elusive to those who ponder questions of antitrust, the discipline of law that aims to curb threats to the competitive marketplace. Part of the issue is the laws themselves, which were conceived to manage an industrial economy—and have, over time, evolved to focus on a specific set of narrow questions that have little to do with the core problem at hand.”

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“The Company Received An ‘F’ Rating From The Better Business Bureau”

October 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite employing some innovations that markedly improve commuter convenience–using a smartphone to hail a taxi, track it and pay for the ride–Uber seems to be the ickiest of the new Sharing Economy behemoths. It not only disrupts the livelihood of traditional drivers but squeezes its own operators and employs surge pricing when consumers are most vulnerable. Peter Thiel thinks it possible that the Silicon Valley business may be reckless enough to be the new Napster, driving itself out of business by flouting laws. But even though Sean Parker’s company was silenced, online sharing was the larger wave and unstoppable. It might be the same with Uber: The concern may not go forever, but what it represents won’t be stopped and will make things better and worse. From Mike Isaac at the New York Times:

“Uber, the smartphone-based hail-a-ride service, often claims it is cheaper than a ride in a taxi. It looks as if some Uber customers do not agree.

The company received an ‘F’ rating from the Better Business Bureau on Thursday, the lowest possible rating given by the organization.

The grade is based on, among other criteria, more than 90 Uber customer complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau over the last three years, most of them centering on Uber’s so-called surge pricing.

Customers still feel misinformed about how they are charged for their rides, according to complaints at the bureau’s website, and say they are not able to receive adequate customer service when they try to complain about their fares.

With its surge pricing, Uber’s temporarily increases fare prices anywhere from one and a half to 10 times the normal cost of taking an Uber ride, based on the demand for drivers. When many people in a particular area request Uber at the same time, for example, the price of rides in that area goes up.

‘I never knew about surcharges until after the fact and was unaware, confused and uninformed,’ one customer wrote on the bureau’s site.”

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“One Of The Things That Was Thought To Be 100 Percent True Was That No One Would Read Anything Long On The Internet”

October 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Women’s Wear Daily interview conducted by Alexandra Steigrad, New Yorker EIC David Remnick reminds of something that is all but forgotten these days: During Web 1.0, the overwhelming consensus was that nobody wanted to read long articles (let alone books) on a computer screen, and they never would. I worked in some places that had 300-word limits on writing for this reason. It wasn’t mainly that there were slow downloads, rudimentary design and navigation and unwieldy devices (though all of that is true), but rather that industry professionals believed there was some neurological barrier to enjoying longreads online. It was like designing automobiles with the expectation that drivers would use them in their neighborhoods but never over great distances. Seems silly now, with certain adventurous readers devouring War and Peace on smartphones. Perhaps there was initially a neurological barrier, but if so we rewired our brains with repetition. An excerpt:

“WWD:

Is long-form journalism still alive and well?

David Remnick:

I think it’s absolutely alive and well. I was interested in the Web from the get-go. I used to get invited to digital events, knowing I was being invited as a Brontosaurus editor from an old media outlet, The New Yorker. I would go to these sessions with really smart people, usually in there 20s, and, at the time, I was in my 40s. There were evangelical tenets to what was true and what was not true, and one of the things that was thought to be 100 percent true was that no one would read anything long on the Internet. That turned out to be absolute nonsense. Some of the most widely read things for The New Yorker on the Web are [around] 10,000 or 25,000 words long. When I think about our future, it’s an encouraging thing to know that this is what we’ve been trying to be great at for a very long time.”

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“He Suggested 11-Hour Shifts And Pushing The Retirement Age To 75”

October 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Like a lot of super-rich people, Carlos Slim rearranges the world as he sees fit in his head–and sometimes in reality. I’ve previously posted about his idea for a 3-day work week. A little more on the topic from Matt Egan at CNNMoney:

Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecom tycoon worth over $80 billion, believes life would be better with a three-day work week.

“You should have more time for you during all of your life — not when you’re 65 and retired, Slim told CNNMoney’s Christine Romans on Tuesday.

But if Slim had his way, people would also work longer days and much later in life. He suggested 11-hour shifts and pushing the retirement age to 75.

Slim raised eyebrows over the summer by calling for a three-day work week, but he doubled down on that proposal on Tuesday.

“I am sure it will happen,” the 74-year-old told CNNMoney, though he conceded he’s not sure when.•

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“They Even Market Themselves To Kids, Manipulating Popular Video Games Such As Grand Theft Auto V”

October 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech | Permalink

Why fight ISIS and not Assad? It’s certainly not for humanitarian reasons. Way more Syrians have been tortured and killed by the nation’s blood-soaked President than have been murdered in Syria and Iraq by the thoroughly modern, Rolex-wearing jihadists. It’s obviously for two reasons. One is strategic: While the crisis in Syria is horrifying, it’s contained within the state and doesn’t threaten other countries. The other is because of the ISIS marriage of medieval brutality (beheadings and mass executions) with modern marketing technology (Youtube, social media and video games). It’s hard to avoid the terror, and that’s the point. They’re not flying into your towers but into your head. From Christoph Reuter, Raniah Salloum and Samiha Shafy at Spiegel:

“In recent months, Islamic State has become known for its adept video production and its fighters are widely present on all manner of social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram and SoundCloud. If their accounts get closed down, they just register under new names.

But the group’s marketing gurus do much more than simply repeat the same message ad infinitum on different platforms. They design each video and each message to correlate exactly to the target audience. For Western observers, they are cool, clean and coherent. For locals, they are bloody, brutal and fear-inducing.

Bringing People Together

When it works to their advantage, they exaggerate their own massacres. Sometimes they falsify the identity of their victims. The thousands of fellow Sunnis they killed in Syria were branded simply as ‘godless Shiites’ on television. They even market themselves to kids, manipulating popular video games such as Grand Theft Auto V so that Islamic State fighters and the group’s black flag make an appearance.

In short videos from the series ‘Mujatweets,’ an apparently German fighter talks about his supposedly wonderful life in the Caliphate. Such scenes, depicting the multicultural Islamic State brotherhood, are clearly meant for Muslims in the West. ‘Look here,’ the message is, ‘everyone is equal here!’ The images suggest that jihad has no borders; that it brings people together and makes them happy. Other blogs include women gushing about family life in wartime and the honor of being the widow of a martyr.

Islamic State’s propaganda offers something for every demographic — it is so professionally produced that al-Qaida looks old-fashioned by comparison. It is, as the New York Times recently dubbed it, ‘jihad 3.0.'”

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“NASA Is Bankrolling Research Into The Technology Necessary To Put People To Sleep For Months At A Time”

October 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One way to drastically reduce the cost of a mission to Mars is to render unconscious the astronauts, inducing them into hibernation, into a cave of their own dreams. From Jordan Pearson at Wired Motherboard:

NASA is bankrolling research into the technology necessary to put people to sleep for months at a time via SpaceWorks, an Atlanta-based company that presented their work at last week’s International Astronomical Congress in Toronto.

According to the company, inducing torpor in a crew of astronauts would eliminate the need for space-wasting accommodations like food galleys, exercise equipment, and large living quarters. Robots that electrically stimulate key muscle groups and intravenously-delivered sustenance will take care of all that.

By eliminating the extra room required for people to live and move around in, ships could be smaller, and more safety features like better shielding could be added. According to SpaceWorks’ mockups, the size of astronaut crew living quarters for a Mars mission could be reduced from their currently proposed size of 8.2×9 metres to just 4.3×7.5. That drastic reduction in size means huge savings on build materials and lift costs for the cash-strapped agency.•

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“Livestock Is An Antiquated Technology”

October 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It would be tremendous for animals and the environment, not to mention people, if vegetable faux meat replaced the kind from stock that is living. The key to winning that war isn’t just to appeal to ethics but to make the tastes equal. The answer might be “plant blood.” From Evelyn M. Rusli at the Wall Street Journal:

“Patrick Brown, a 60-year-old Stanford University professor turned first-time entrepreneur, says he has found the secret to replicating the taste of red meat: plant ‘blood.’

On a recent afternoon in his company’s expansive laboratory, Mr. Brown poured a deep-red liquid into a plastic cup. The thin concoction looks like blood, has the same distinct metallic taste, and is derived from the molecule found in hemoglobin that makes blood red and steak taste like steak.

But this bioengineered blood comes from plants and is the crown jewel of Mr. Brown’s three-year-old company, Impossible Foods, which has so far created a hamburger that looks, feels, tastes and cooks almost like the real thing.

‘Livestock is an antiquated technology,’ said Mr. Brown, a biochemistry scientist known for his genetic research.

Impossible Foods is part of a wave of well-funded startups seeking to replicate meats, eggs, cheese and other animal-based foods with plant matter. Their aim is not only to upend the trillion-dollar animal farming industry but to also create a more sustainable source of food amid mounting environmental pressures.”

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“Old Ethical And Religious Systems No Longer Function”

October 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I disagree with that holy fool Slavoj Žižek on some issues, but I agree with him that philosophy is far from dead, our technological and economic situations requiring ethical speculation more than ever. From his Guardian AMA:

Question:

What is the future of philosophy – both within academia and in the so-called ‘collective consciousness’?

Slavoj Žižek:

I think philosophy will become more important than ever, even for so-called “ordinary people.” Why? The incredible social dynamics of today’s capitalism, as well as scientific and technological breakthroughs, changed our situation so much that old ethical and religious systems no longer function. Think about biogenetic interventions, which may even change your character, how your psyche works. This was no even a possibility considered in traditional ethical systems, which means that we all in a way have to think. We have to make decisions. We cannot rely on old religious and ethical formulas. Like: are you for or against biogenetic interventions? In order to decide, to take a stance, you have somehow implicitly to address questions like: do I have a free will? Am I really responsible for my acts? And so on. So I think that 21st century will be the century of philosophy.•

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“N.F.L. Teams, By Contrast, Operate In Unison To Protect One Of The Most Micromanaged Brands In Existence”

October 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Boxing went from the Sport of Kings to an all-but-empty throne in the U.S. in just two or three decades, parents no longer willing to allow their children to suffer repeated blows to the brain, even if it seemed a way out for impoverished children. (Some very non-contact sports like cricket also went away quickly in America.) It’s almost impossible to envision the NFL suffering the same fate even though there’s no path for the league to avoid the preponderance of scary health issues. In a New York Times piece, Ian McGugan argues that the pro-football cartel is too well-organized to be sidelined despite its concussion problems and PR nightmares, the sport too ingrained in America to vanish even with declining Pop Warner league participation. The opening:

“The N.F.L., from at least one perspective, has had a pretty rough month. In the span of a few days, as most everyone knows, a video surfaced depicting the Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocking his future wife unconscious; then the Minnesota Vikings superstar Adrian Peterson was booked for purportedly whipping his 4-year-old son with a tree branch. All the while, a clutch of other players faced the consequences of their own ostensible involvement in domestic-violence incidents. But as pundits wondered if the scandals could mark the beginning of the end for America’s favorite sport, the N.F.L.’s television ratings surpassed their levels from a year earlier. The uptick points to a surprising reality: Despite all its current problems, pro football is positioned to not only weather its current storm, but also to sail through it toward greater prosperity.

Boxing — another macho pastime populated by guys you might hesitate to invite to a merlot tasting — shows how a spectacle can lose its grip on the public. Once arguably the most popular sport in America, boxing has long since been divided into rival fiefs by promoters who sometimes seem to be auditioning for a Tarantino movie. N.F.L. teams, by contrast, operate in unison to protect one of the most micromanaged brands in existence. At the head of that collective is a commissioner with the broadest powers of any leader in sports. The ‘no fun league’ lays down the law on everything from the color of socks players can wear to what celebrations are acceptable after a touchdown. (The league’s most recent diktat: no dunking the ball over the goal post.) Whenever the league has faced threats in the past — gambling scandals or labor conflicts — franchise owners have generally snapped into formation behind the boss. ‘For all the talk about competition on the field,’ says Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the University of Michigan, ‘it’s really a socialist collective off the field.’

In many ways, after all, N.F.L. football has transcended sports to become a mass-produced, highly managed and artfully promoted product.”

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Old Print Article: “Beam Of Light Starts, Stops Empty Car,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1930)

October 8, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Telephone instructions, electric eyes and beams of light were used to maneuver an early robocar that followed remote orders and needed no driver. It was a novelty from Westinghouse, though it doesn’t appear any long-term application was planned. (Scroll down to the bottom of this PDF to see a photo of the actual demo.) An article follows about the driverless Willys-Knight from the January 7, 1930 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Urban Farming Has Begun To Shift”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

MIT’s Caleb Harper is something of a Rappaccini, wildly experimenting with incubated plants in his lab, hoping to make urban farming bloom, so that a growing world population can be fed. From Kevin Gray at Wired UK:

“Even amid the creative genius and goofy playfulness of MIT’s Media Lab near Boston — where giant inflatable sharks dangle from ceilings, workbenches are populated by unblinking robot heads and skinny scientists with mutton chops and Hawaiian shirts pay rapt attention to indecipherable whiteboard scribbles — Caleb Harper is an oddball. While his coworkers develop artificial –intelligence, smart prosthetics, folding cars and 3D neural-imaging systems, Harper is growing lettuce. In the past year, he has transformed a small lounge outside his fifth-floor lab into a high-tech garden worthy of a sci-fi film. Species of lettuce — as well as broccoli, tomatoes and basil — grow in mid-air, bathed in blue and red LED lights, their ghostly white roots dangling like jellyfish. They are stacked in shelves on an exterior glass wall, seven metres long and 2.5 metres high, meant to resemble the exterior of an office building. If Harper and his team get their way, entire city districts will one day look like this, a living and edible garden.

‘I believe there’s the possibility that we can change the world and change the food system,’ says Harper, a tall and stocky 34-year-old in a blue shirt and cowboy boots. ‘The potential for urban farming is huge. And it’s not all bullshit.’ Urban farming has begun to shift from its look-what-we-can-do phase of growing salads and vegetables on industrial rooftops and in empty city spaces, to a new wave of innovation that is being led by thinkers — and makers — like Harper. As founder of the year-old CityFARM project at MIT, Harper is figuring out how to use data science to optimise crop yields, deploy networked sensors to ‘listen’ to a plant’s water, nutrient and carbon needs, and deliver optimal light wavelengths — not just for photosynthesis but to change the flavour of foods. And he hopes to bolt his towering plantations on to the buildings in which we live and work.

His system promises to change the economics of industrial agriculture and to lessen its burden on the environment.”

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“Depression Is Their Normal State, Except When Spending Is Supported By Bubbles”

October 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a review of Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks in the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman argues that the financial bubble may not have led to the 2008 crash but merely briefly masked an economy that has stalled in a long-term way. An excerpt:

“Emphasizing the need to reduce financial fragility makes sense if you believe that the legacy of past financial excess is the reason we’re in so much trouble now. But are we sure about that? Let me offer two reasons to be skeptical.

First, while the depression that overtook the Western world in 2008 clearly came after the collapse of a vast financial bubble, that doesn’t mean that the bubble caused the depression. Late in The Shifts and the Shocks Wolf mentions the reemergence of the ‘secular stagnation’ hypothesis, most famously in the speeches and writing of Lawrence Summers (Lord Adair Turner independently made similar points, as did I). But I’m not sure whether readers will grasp the full implications. If the secular stagnationists are right, advanced economies now suffer from persistently inadequate demand, so that depression is their normal state, except when spending is supported by bubbles. If that’s true, bubbles aren’t the root of the problem; they’re actually a good thing while they last, because they prop up demand. Unfortunately, they’re not sustainable—so what we need urgently are policies to support demand on a continuing basis, which is an issue very different from questions of financial regulation.

Wolf actually does address this issue briefly, suggesting that the answer might lie in deficit spending financed by the government’s printing press. But this radical suggestion is, as I said, overshadowed by his calls for more financial regulation. It’s the morality play aspect again: the idea that we need to don a hairshirt and repent our sins resonates with many people, while the idea that we may need to abandon conventional notions of fiscal and monetary virtue has few takers.”

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“The City’s Grid Would Change Immeasurably”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Oh, it’s fun designing a city on paper or even redesigning one. At i09, Annalee Newitz has a thought experiment for making over New York: Imagine it all of a sudden becomes a megacity with triple the population and figure out how to make that sustainable. Probably good to practice since the number of New Yorkers will likely head to that stratosphere over the decades, if flooding doesn’t become a recurrent issue. An excerpt from the “Disappearing Streets” section:

“New York City is already one of the most densely-packed urban spaces in the world, with 10,724 people on average per square kilometer. To triple the living spaces here, we’ll need to build up — but we’ll also need to build between. The city could no longer afford to devote so much street space to the products of an already-shaky auto industry, and the city’s grid would change immeasurably. So would the laws that govern it.

For efficiency’s sake, Manhattan would have to retain a couple of the major avenues like Fifth, which cuts through the center of the island. But it would be reserved for trucks delivering food — or taking garbage out. Other streets would be for licensed taxis and services like Uber, while cars belonging to individuals might be routed to the edges of island, or to other boroughs entirely. Getting around in Manhattan would mean taking public transit, or paying dearly to get an Uber.

At the same time, there would be a flowering of pedestrian walkways like Sixth and a Half Avenue, which tunnels through the skyscrapers of midtown in between Sixth and Seventh Aves. As more skyscrapers grew, walkways would also take to the skies in bridges between buildings. To keep the ground-level streets less congested, pedestrians would be invited to walk Broadway from the air, hustling from building to building via a growing network of architectural tissues that would nourish a new sidewalk culture fifteen stories off the ground.

Some of these elevated sidewalks would be classic New York, complete with tar-gummed concrete and jagged nubs of rusted rebar poking out at odd angles. But others would look like high-tech works of art.”

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“So What Does Explain The ‘Obesity Penalty’?”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Economist has a piece about the so-called “Obesity Penalty,” which is supported by a new Swedish study which argues that overweight people earn less than their weed-like co-workers. Probably a good idea to be circumspect about the whole thing–or at least the causes if the effect is real. An excerpt:

“BEING obese is the same as not having an undergraduate degree. That’s the bizarre message from a new paper that looks at the economic fortunes of Swedish men who enlisted in compulsory military service in the 1980s and 1990s. They show that men who are obese aged 18 grow up to earn 16% less than their peers of a normal weight. Even people who were overweight at 18—that is, with a body-mass index from 25 to 30—see significantly lower wages as an adult.

At first glance, a sceptic might be unconvinced by the results. After all, within countries the poorest people tend to be the fattest. One study found that Americans who live in the most poverty-dense counties are those most prone to obesity. If obese people tend to come from impoverished backgrounds, then we might expect them to have lower earnings as an adult.

But the authors get around this problem by mainly focusing on brothers. Every person included in their final sample—which is 150,000 people strong—has at least one male sibling also in that sample. That allows the economists to use ‘fixed-effects,’ a statistical technique that accounts for family characteristics (such as poverty). They also include important family characteristics like the parents’ income. All this statistical trickery allows the economists to isolate the effect of obesity on earnings.

So what does explain the ‘obesity penalty’?”

“Tesla’s Foray Into Features That Allow Autonomous Driving Reflects A Wider Push Among Auto Makers”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My guess is that even if we have cars that are 90% autonomous (at least on highways) by 2015 and fully robotic in a half-dozen years as Elon Musk promises, it will take substantially longer than that to modify infrastructure to meet the demand. If no retrofitting is required, then that’s a whole different conversation. From Mike Ramsey at WSJ:

“Tesla Motors Inc. plans to unveil features that enable more computer-controlled driving of its Model S electric sedan on Thursday, following up on tweets sent by the company’s founder last week, according to a person familiar with the matter.

At an event scheduled for Thursday in Hawthorne, Calif., the Silicon Valley auto maker will announce the latest upgrades, about a week after Chief Executive Elon Musk posted a pair of tweets suggesting the auto maker soon would announce a product he referred to as ‘D.’

A Tesla spokeswoman declined to comment on the specifics of this week’s announcement.

Tesla’s foray into features that allow autonomous driving reflects a wider push among auto makers to produce cars that can handle more driving functions on their own. Mr. Musk recently said Tesla will have a fully autonomous car ready in five to six years.”

“In 2014, It’s Hard To Overstate McLuhan’s Prescience”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Do people still consider Marshall McLuhan to be so many mumbles the way they did when he fell from grace, without cause, by 1980 or so? He wasn’t always right, but the theorist was no Nostradamus, whose writing needs to be spun like an angel on the head of a pin to appear to be right. McLuhan was more correct about the looming Information Age than anyone. From Paul Herbert’s Pacific-Standard piece, “The Medium Is the Message: 50 Years Later“:

“TWENTY YEARS AGO, IN the introduction to a re-print of Understanding Media, renowned editor Lewis H. Lapham wrote that much of what McLuhan had to say made a lot more sense in 1994 than it did in 1964, what with two terms of Reagan and the creation of MTV. Twenty years after that, the banality of McLuhan’s ideas have solidified their merit. When Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, for example, compared the expansion of big data to the planet developing a central nervous system, that’s McLuhan. When Chief Justice John Roberts opined that an alien from Mars might mistake the smartphone as an integral feature of human anatomy, that’s McLuhan, too. In 2014, it’s hard to overstate McLuhan’s prescience.

‘People who don’t like McLuhan in the academic world are either lazy, stupid, jealous, or some combination,’ says Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, where McLuhan taught for a year in the late ’60s. ‘McLuhan wasn’t into commonsense, reasonable propositions. He liked looking at things in a poetic, metaphoric way.’

And it’s true: McLuhan had a penchant for speaking in riddles and rhymes that might baffle at first, but grow into epiphany if given the chance. His rhetorical style was hyperbole. He didn’t shy away from playing the holy fool, as Wired would later call him, and on a number of occasions claimed his mission was simply to probe the new terrain, not come back to camp with answers.”

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McLuhan with Tom Wolfe, one of his champions, in 1970:

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“In A World Where Getting Old Is No Longer An Issue, Concerns Will Arise About Population Levels”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Aubrey de Grey operates at the extreme edges of gerontology, believing we won’t just extend life a little but essentially defeat death. But if we could live hundreds of years–or forever–what would this endless summer mean for global population? From Factor-Tech:

In a world where getting old is no longer an issue, concerns will arise about population levels and resources that the planet can provide.

De Grey admits that the world will change dramatically and that the transformation will not necessarily be a smooth one. “There may be some turbulence and obviously the more we can forward plan to minimise that turbulence the better,” he adds.

One UN report, from 2003, predicts that the world’s population could increase to more than 36bn people by 2300 – and that forecast is based on regular life expectancy. If everyone is living for hundreds of years then the resources needed to sustain them would drastically increase.

But this view does not give credit to other technologies that are developing at a faster implementation rate than anti-ageing, and people can have a blinkered view about this.

“They just don’t look at the problem properly so for example, one thing that people hardly ever acknowledge is that the other new technology is going to be around a great deal sooner than this technology, or at least sooner than this technology will have any demographic impact,” de Grey says.

“For example we will have much less carbon footprint because we will have things like better renewable energy and nuclear fusion and so on, so that it will actually be increasing the carrying capacity of the planet far faster than the defeat of ageing could increase the number of people on the planet.”•

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