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“This Is Not The First Time That A U.K. Government Has Looked To Robots To Boost The Economy”

June 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Thirty years after trying and failing to turn the UK into a hub for robotics, technologists and politicians are having another go at it. From Amir Mizroch in the Wall Street Journal:

“For the past 18 months, everyone who is anyone in the U.K.’s robotics sector has been hard at work on making sure everything goes according to plan, drawing up a strategy paper to determine the future of intelligent, autonomous machines—AKA robots— in Britain.

A final version of the document, written by the 20 experts of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Special Interest Group (RAS-SIG), is to be officially unveiled by Science Minister David Willets on July 1.

According to interviews with two members of the interest group, an external consultant, and a summary of earlier drafts, the strategy rests on several key pillars.  Legislators will make the U.K. the world’s most welcoming place for robotics research, testing and development. It won’t be just about creating robots, but also about creating standards and regulations that allow for easier testing of autonomous machines. Areas of industry will be created to tackle some of the country’s most challenging problems, like the decommissioning of nuclear sites, opening up farming productivity, and robotic monitoring of sewage pipes and offshore gas and oil rigs.

Government will deploy robots to build schools, roads and hospitals, and care for the elderly. It will help fund robotics research at schools and universities to raise the number of people who can make and work with robots.  New technologies that improve the ability of humans to control multiple robots simultaneously will be highlighted. Culturally, there will be an emphasis on explaining that automation does not cost people their jobs, but actually creates more opportunities and opens possibilities.

This is not the first time that a U.K. government has looked to robots to boost the economy. Mired in recession, the Thatcher government launched a campaign in 1985 to increase the number of robots in industry. According to the British Automation and Robot Association, in 1982 only 100 robots out of 439 installed in the country were built by U.K. engineers. Most of the robots were installed in the auto industry sector. Thirty years later, the number of new robots working in the U.K. in 2012 alone was 2,447—none of them were manufactured in the U.K.“

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“I Don’t Know That People Are Going To Be Printing Guns Around The World”

June 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Shane Hickey’s Guardian article about Chuck Hull, father of 3D printing, who says he isn’t sure if people will use the machines to make guns, which they most assuredly will:

“When Hull originally came up with his invention, he told his wife that it would take between 25 and 30 years before the technology would find its way into the home. That prediction proved correct as the realistic prospect of widespread commercial 3D printers has only emerged in recent years.

The possibilities appear endless – from home-printed food and pharmaceuticals to suggestions that pictures of ceramics will be able to be taken in shops and then recreated using plans downloaded from the internet.

Hull, an unassuming man who has 93 patents to his name in the US and 20 in Europe, says he is ‘humbled’ by the possibilities but stops short of predicting what his technology could eventually deliver, although he is confident printers could soon be in every home.

‘It’s nice to get some recognition, it was a lot of hard work but other than that I just keep working,’ he said last week in Berlin, where he received a European Inventor Award.

Controversy has arisen with the possibility that guns will be able to be produced using 3D printing, again using blueprints downloaded from the internet. A group called Defense Distributed last year successfully tested a 3D printed gun in Texas. Hull said: ‘My first thought is that people messing with that – I hope they don’t hurt themselves. Building and testing guns of that nature could be dangerous. I think the people doing that were trying to make a point.

‘I don’t know that people are going to be printing guns around the world but in any case our company, we are not the government or the police agencies. It is more their business and all technology, the governments and the police have to be aware [of], it is not just 3D printing.'”

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“Viewers Would Record Their Opinions By Marking Computer Cards, Which They Would Mail To Regional Tabulating Centers”

June 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1969, computer-processing magnate Ross Perot had a McLuhan-ish dream: an electronic town hall in which interactive television and computer punch cards would allow the masses, rather than elected officials, to decide key American policies. In 1992, he held fast to this goal–one that was perhaps more democratic than any society could survive–when he bankrolled his own populist third-party Presidential campaign. The opening of “Perot’s Vision: Consensus By Computer,” a New York Times article from that year by the late Michael Kelly:

WASHINGTON, June 5— Twenty-three years ago, Ross Perot had a simple idea.

The nation was splintered by the great and painful issues of the day. There had been years of disorder and disunity, and lately, terrible riots in Los Angeles and other cities. People talked of an America in crisis. The Government seemed to many to be ineffectual and out of touch.

What this country needed, Mr. Perot thought, was a good, long talk with itself.

The information age was dawning, and Mr. Perot, then building what would become one of the world’s largest computer-processing companies, saw in its glow the answer to everything. One Hour, One Issue

Every week, Mr. Perot proposed, the television networks would broadcast an hourlong program in which one issue would be discussed. Viewers would record their opinions by marking computer cards, which they would mail to regional tabulating centers. Consensus would be reached, and the leaders would know what the people wanted.

Mr. Perot gave his idea a name that draped the old dream of pure democracy with the glossy promise of technology: ‘the electronic town hall.’

Today, Mr. Perot’s idea, essentially unchanged from 1969, is at the core of his ‘We the People’ drive for the Presidency, and of his theory for governing.

It forms the basis of Mr. Perot’s pitch, in which he presents himself, not as a politician running for President, but as a patriot willing to be drafted ‘as a servant of the people’ to take on the ‘dirty, thankless’ job of rescuing America from ‘the Establishment,’ and running it.

In set speeches and interviews, the Texas billionaire describes the electronic town hall as the principal tool of governance in a Perot Presidency, and he makes grand claims: ‘If we ever put the people back in charge of this country and make sure they understand the issues, you’ll see the White House and Congress, like a ballet, pirouetting around the stage getting it done in unison.’

Although Mr. Perot has repeatedly said he would not try to use the electronic town hall as a direct decision-making body, he has on other occasions suggested placing a startling degree of power in the hands of the television audience.

He has proposed at least twice — in an interview with David Frost broadcast on April 24 and in a March 18 speech at the National Press Club — passing a constitutional amendment that would strip Congress of its authority to levy taxes, and place that power directly in the hands of the people, in a debate and referendum orchestrated through an electronic town hall.•

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A Brief Note From 1911 About New Eyelids

June 21, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 27, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Kansas City–The eyelids of Rev. Joseph Hohe, rector of the Catholic Church near Bucyrus, Kansas, which were burned off when a lamp exploded in his hands, have been replaced by new ones constructed from pieces of skin cut from the priest’s arms and grafted onto the stumps of his lids, over which he has almost complete muscular control. The operation was performed in a local hospital.”

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“The Prediction Of The Theory Would Be That Apple Won’t Succeed With The iPhone”

June 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My main objection to the 10,000-hour rule is that it cherry-picks particular pieces of research that provide a nice round number for a narrative attempting to make sharp an old saw (“Practice Makes Perfect”). It tells a macro story that doesn’t gibe with the micro, trying to pitch a camping tent over an entire city, stretching the fabric beyond its capacity for coverage.

The cult of Disruption is not dissimilar in how it goes about building its case. In the business world and beyond, radical innovation and its ability to replenish is revered, sometimes to a jaw-dropping extent. In one of my favorite non-fiction articles of the year, “The Disruption Machine,” Jill Lepore of the New Yorker takes apart the bible behind the idea, Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, which like the 10,000-hour rule, builds its case very selectively and not necessarily accurately. An excerpt:

“The theory of disruption is meant to be predictive. On March 10, 2000, Christensen launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent. In 2007, Christensen told Business Week that ‘the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone,’ adding, ‘History speaks pretty loudly on that.’ In its first five years, the iPhone generated a hundred and fifty billion dollars of revenue. In the preface to the 2011 edition of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen reports that, since the book’s publication, in 1997, ‘the theory of disruption continues to yield predictions that are quite accurate.’ This is less because people have used his model to make accurate predictions about things that haven’t happened yet than because disruption has been sold as advice, and because much that happened between 1997 and 2011 looks, in retrospect, disruptive. Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact. History speaks loudly, apparently, only when you can make it say what you want it to say. The popular incarnation of the theory tends to disavow history altogether. ‘Predicting the future based on the past is like betting on a football team simply because it won the Super Bowl a decade ago,’ Josh Linkner writes in The Road to Reinvention. His first principle: ‘Let go of the past.’ It has nothing to tell you. But, unless you already believe in disruption, many of the successes that have been labelled disruptive innovation look like something else, and many of the failures that are often seen to have resulted from failing to embrace disruptive innovation look like bad management.

Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation.”

 

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“Ideally, Helpful Organisms Would Eat Things We Don’t Need”

June 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Susannah Locke’s Vox primer about synthetic biology, which could be both really great and really messy, a few potential uses of these new cellular designs:

“Medicine: Synthetic biology might one day let scientists program cells to precisely detect and kill cancer cells. Or perhaps program cells to self-assemble into spare organs for transplants. Some scientists are already using partially synthetic organisms to manufacture drugs that are otherwise impractical to make.

Food and fragrances: In theory, new techniques could allow researchers to design yeast to make the perfect beer or wine. Or create food in the lab more efficiently than growing it on land. ‘We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature,’ biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter told the New York Times.

Already, synthetic biology companies are selling orange and grapefruit flavorings produced by yeast. And the company Evolva makes yeast-generated artificial vanilla flavoring and is working on better tasting sugar substitutes.

Energy and environment: Another possibility is that synthetic biologists could program cells to produce usable fuel. For example, Exxon Mobile has a partnership with Synthetic Genomics (co-founded by Craig Venter) to research fuel from algae. Ideally, helpful organisms would eat things we don’t need, like non-edible plant matter. Even more ideally, they’d eat the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s warming the planet. Or toxic waste or oil from oil spills.

The weird stuff: How about some microbes that live on your skin to prevent you from getting oily and smelly? How about some other ones that secrete the perfume of your choice? How about some that quickly break down cholesterol so it won’t clog people’s arteries?”

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“For The First Time, The Free Will Of A Living Animal Was Taken Over By An External Machine”

June 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his Guardian defense of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek takes things to extremes, as is he is wont to do. An excerpt:

“In a country such as China the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, with no illusions about it. In the US, however, formal freedoms are guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms. Whistleblowers do something much more important than stating the obvious by way of denouncing the openly oppressive regimes: they render public the unfreedom that underlies the very situation in which we experience ourselves as free.

Back in May 2002, it was reported that scientists at New York University had attached a computer chip able to transmit elementary signals directly to a rat’s brain – enabling scientists to control the rat’s movements by means of a steering mechanism, as used in a remote-controlled toy car. For the first time, the free will of a living animal was taken over by an external machine.

How did the unfortunate rat experience its movements, which were effectively decided from outside? Was it totally unaware that its movements were being steered? Maybe therein lies the difference between Chinese citizens and us, free citizens of western, liberal countries: the Chinese human rats are at least aware they are controlled, while we are the stupid rats strolling around unaware of how our movements are monitored.”

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“The Cars Themselves Were Regarded As Cheap, Not Very Reliable, Oddballs”

June 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the always fun Delanceyplace, a description of Japan’s initially bumpy entry into the American auto market in the 1950s, from Daniel Yergin’s The Quest:

“An odd and unfamiliar car might have been seen fleetingly on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1950s. It was Toyota’s Toyopet S30 Crown, the first Japanese car to be brought officially to the United States. In Tokyo, Toyopets were used as taxis. But in the United States the Toyopet did not get off to a good start; the first two could not even get over the hills around Los Angeles. It is said that the first car delivered in San Francisco died on the first hill it encountered on the way to inspection. An auto dealer in that city drove it 180 times in reverse around the public library in an effort to promote it, but to no avail. The Toyopet, priced at $1,999, was anything but a hit. Over a four-year period, a total of 1,913 were sold. Other Japanese automakers also started exporting to the United States, but the numbers sold remained exceedingly modest, and the cars themselves were regarded as cheap, not very reliable, oddballs, and starter cars (lacking the vim and panache of what was then the hot import, the Volkswagen Beetle).”

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“Kasem Was The Voice Of A Less Algorithmic Time”

June 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Viewed from inside the airtight world of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, you can almost understand why the host famously melted down for having to do a “goddamn death dedication” after coming out of a “fucking uptempo record.” You see, Casey’s syndicated parallel United States was meant to be a respite from the real and often-confusing society we actually live in, a place where no unsettling sounds could be heard, a program that could turn every living room into a panic room, a sanctuary safer even than the green room at the Charlie Rose show. As the channels decentralized and multiplied, and the vernacular grew franker, he steadfastly refused to say the word “sex” on the radio or play versions of rap records that contained the N-word. And even as the very medium that made him famous collapsed, with digital killing both the radio and video star, Kasem fought to keep the barbarians of the new normal at the gate. From Alex Pappademas’ excellent Grantland postmortem of the man who only counted backwards:

“In 1989, Casey and Jean Kasem entertained Nikki Finke — then a sharp-toothed, young Los Angeles Times reporter — in their seven-room Beverly Wilshire Hotel apartment, from which the Kasems were organizing a housing-crisis march. ‘The boss sits in a marbled-to-the-max kitchen,’ Finke wrote. ‘The boss’s wife toils in a satin moire-draped dressing room. The publicists make phone calls from the exercise gym. And the typists pound their keyboards on a priceless buffet table that seats 12.’ Later, Kasem is described as ‘more likely to be listening to a speech by Malcolm X on his cassette player than music by Miami Sound Machine.’

It’s hard to square the image of Kasem edutaining himself via the words of Brother Malcolm with, say, the story — mentioned in this Washington Post obit  — about Kasem agreeing to change his show’s chart methodology in the early ’90s in order to mollify affiliates who wanted nothing to do with hip-hop even as it became a commercial force. Kasem began basing his list on airplay data from the country’s biggest Top 40 stations rather than the sales chart in Billboard; it was probably a choice he was forced to make, but the truth was he had never sounded entirely comfortable back-announcing ‘O.P.P.’ or ‘Rump Shaker.’ You can only hurdle so many generation gaps before your ankles start to give out.

Still, Kasem provided a point of entry to the bewildering world of popular music for a lot of people, and young people in particular, who went on to love music more than he ever did. He was one of the least rock-criticky people who ever played records for a living, but he undoubtedly turned countless people into rock critics, trainspotters, trivia banks, and maintainers of eccentrically ordered personal Hot 100s. What we’re mourning when we mourn him, beyond that, is the passing of a time when a ranked list of popular songs still seemed capable of revealing something about what songs actual people actually liked.

In the time it took me to read one Billboard.com article about Casey Kasem’s now-widow throwing meat at her stepchildren, I watched Jason Derulo’s ‘Wiggle’ dethrone Ed Sheeran’s ‘Afire Love’ onBillboard’s Twitter-powered ‘Trending 140’ chart, which ranks ‘the fastest moving songs shared on Twitter in the U.S., measured by acceleration over the past hour.’ Now that paying money for recordings has become the jury duty of pop-music appreciation, we measure twitches of interest, flicks of the eye, spambot-team efficacy. Kasem was the voice of a less algorithmic time, and that’s a hard thing not to feel a pang about — whether you have kids, or pets, or neither.”

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“The U.S. Is Still Catching Up From Missing The World Cup From 1950 To 1990”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his Priceonomics essay, “Why Are Some Countries Good at Soccer?” Alex Mayyasi lays out some of the reasons why the U.S. doesn’t have a pretty record at the beautiful game without touching on the most obvious one: Our best athletes lack financial incentive to commit to the sport. Imagine our team if Lebron James and Billy Hamilton and Calvin Johnson played only soccer from when they were young. That’s what would happen if they were raised in countries where that sport is king, but it’s not the case in America, where more immediate monetary rewards come from other athletics. While a soccer salary in Europe can be stratospheric, there’s a lot of distance a talented American youth athlete would have to travel, figuratively as well as literally, to secure one. Their odds for winning the lottery are better if they concentrate on sports that are popular domestically. From Mayyasi:

“Current U.S. head coach Jurgen Klinsmann has cited the lack of soccer culture in the United States as an obstacle, saying that ‘One thing is certain: The American kids need hundreds and even thousands more hours to play.’ FiveThirtyEight recently reviewed the work of Stefan Szymanski, author of Soccernomics, which found that the best predictor of a country’s success in the World Cup is the number of games the national team had played. According to Szymanski, this means the U.S. men’s national team not only has less experience, but it has missed out on adapting strategy from the rest of the world by playing significantly fewer games — the U.S. is still catching up from missing the World Cup from 1950 to 1990.

After all, the thesis of the 10,000 hour rule, as debated by psychologists, is not merely that masters need lots of practice, but that the type of practice matters. Klinsmann, the U.S. head coach, has placed  on recruiting Americans who play in European leagues and face ‘the best competition in the world on a daily basis instead of only a few games every few years,’ as is the case for MLS players on the World Cup team.

Similarly, aspects of the U.S. youth soccer system seems to keep young players from engaging in ‘deliberate practice’ as much as their peers elsewhere. In America, young players compete in dozens and even hundreds of games every year — games that crowd out time that European youths spend practicing skills and fundamentals. ‘It’s counterproductive to learning,’ John Hackworth, the former under-17 national team coach, tells the New York Times, ‘and the No. 1 worst thing we do.’ And while foreign teams prioritize development by giving star players extra attention and allowing them to play with older and better players, the American focus on winning and the team keeps youth soccer in America from shaping future stars of the national team.”

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“It’s Almost Like Ancient Ruins”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Suburban American malls, ghost towns of the Digital Age, brick and mortars sacrificed at the altar of progress, were the way we lived until we just stopped. We’re far more efficient now, but what was lost in the transition? From David Uberti at the Guardian:

“It is hard to believe there has ever been any life in this place. Shattered glass crunches under Seph Lawless’s feet as he strides through its dreary corridors. Overhead lights attached to ripped-out electrical wires hang suspended in the stale air and fading wallpaper peels off the walls like dead skin.

Lawless sidesteps debris as he passes from plot to plot in this retail graveyard called Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. The shopping centre closed in 2008, and its largest retailers, which had tried to make it as standalone stores, emptied out by the end of last year. When Lawless stops to overlook a two-storey opening near the mall’s once-bustling core, only an occasional drop of water, dribbling through missing ceiling tiles, breaks the silence.

‘You came, you shopped, you dressed nice – you went to the mall. That’s what people did,’ says Lawless, a pseudonymous photographer who grew up in a suburb of nearby Cleveland. “It was very consumer-driven and kind of had an ugly side, but there was something beautiful about it. There was something there.”

Gazing down at the motionless escalators, dead plants and empty benches below, he adds: ‘It’s still beautiful, though. It’s almost like ancient ruins.’

Dying shopping malls are speckled across the United States, often in middle-class suburbs wrestling with socioeconomic shifts.”

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“Our Best Bet For Avoiding Catastrophic Global Warming Is To Wean Ourselves Off Of Fossil Fuels—Altogether—By 2050”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Brian Merchant’s Vice Motherboard article which argues that the industries most in need of creative destruction have thus far largely been impervious to it:

“Right now, a few decades-old technologies are not-so-slowly but surely consigning the planet to burn—and to melt—and gas-powered cars and coal-fired power plants lead the pack. As the chief contributors to planetary warming, there may never have been technologies in such dire need of ‘disruption’, to deploy the buzzword of our times, ever before.

Yet a new energy report from BP shows that our reliance on the ancient energy tech—’modern’ coal power was developed in the 1880s, and the combustion engine rose to prominence in the decades that followed—is only continuing to rise, at the precise moment we need to phase it out. Coal consumption grew to its largest market share since 1970 last year. Oil remains the world’s leading fuel.

As such, we don’t just need to build newer and improved energy technologies—which we have, in the way of solar, wind, geothermal, etc—we desperately need to subject the old ones to Schumpeter-style creative destruction. The latest critical analysis of climate science says our best bet for avoiding catastrophic global warming is to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels—altogether—by 2050. In other words, we can’t just settle for creating new cleantech; we really, really need it to displace the old. Asap. We need to disrupt.

Yes, disrupt.”

“One Would Expect – Fervently Hope – That Books Written In The 21st Century Are Radically Different From Those Written 100 Years Ago”

June 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From “Reading in a Connected Age,” Neil Levy’s Practical Ethics post which argues that the surfeit of information on the Internet isn’t ending literacy but actually changing it in a necessary way:

“Here I want to consider one potential negative effect of the internet. In a recent blog post, Tim Parks argues that the constant availability of the temptations of the internet has led to a decline in the capacity to focus for long periods, and therefore in the capacity to consume big serious books. Big serious books are still written and read, he notes, but ‘the texture of these books seems radically different from the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,’ Their prose has a ‘battering ram quality,’ which enables readers to consume them through frequent interruptions.

But of course one would expect – fervently hope – that books written in the 21st century are radically different from those written 100 years ago. After all, if you want to read Dickens and Dostoevsky and the like, there is plentiful quality literature from that period surviving: why would a contemporary writer add to those stocks? Its worth noting, as Francesca Segal points out, that Dickens’ own work was originally published in serial form: that is, in the bite-size chunks that Parks think characterise the contemporary novel in an age of reduced concentration spans.

Perhaps there is something to Parks’ hypothesis that the way the novel has changed reflects changes in the capacities of contemporary readers, but making that claim is going to take careful study. You can’t make it from the armchair. Without proper data and proper controls, we are vulnerable to the confirmation bias, where we attend to evidence that supports our hypothesis and overlook evidence that doesn’t, and many other biases that make these kinds of anecdotal reports useless as evidence.

Here is what may be happening to Parks. He is finding himself aware of a loss of focus more than he used to be. But is that evidence that he is actually losing focus more often than previously?”

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“It’s Important To Have A Self-Sustaining City On Mars”

June 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Eric Mack at Forbes, comments from Elon Musk about his ambition to establish a city on Mars within a dozen years:

“‘I’m hopeful that the first people can be taken to Mars in 10-12 years,’ Musk said on CNBC this week. ‘I think it’s certainly possible for that to occur.’

But just getting to the red planet is not nearly enough for Musk, who says it’s more important to have ‘a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary.’

He says if humans fail to become a multi-planet species, we will inevitably just hang out here on Earth until some sort of extinction-level event occurs.

But figuring out how we get to Mars and set up shop there is just the beginning of Musk’s grandiose vision. In the past, he’s also said that we may need to figure out ways to bio-engineer our food and even ourselves to make Mars work for us.”

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“What Would Happen If It Were Possible To Increase A Person’s Intelligence?”

June 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Daniel Keyes, the brain-centric novelist who wrote Flowers for Algernon, just passed away. I would suppose the story will take on even greater resonance as we move closer to genuine cognitive enhancement. The origin story behind his most famous novel, from Daniel E. Slotnik in the New York Times:

“The premise underlying Mr. Keyes’s best-known novel struck him while he waited for an elevated train to take him from Brooklyn to New York University in 1945.

‘I thought: My education is driving a wedge between me and the people I love,’ he wrote in his memoir, Algernon, Charlie and I (1999). ‘And then I wondered: What would happen if it were possible to increase a person’s intelligence?’

After 15 years that thought grew into the novella Flowers for Algernon, which was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959 and won the Hugo Award for best short fiction in 1960.

By 1966 Mr. Keyes had expanded the story into a novel with the same title, which tied for the Nebula Award for best novel that year. The film, for which Mr. Robertson won the Academy Award for best actor, was released in 1968.

Flowers for Algernon went on to sell more than five million copies and to become a staple of English classes.”

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A Brief Note From 1911 About Ancient Wheat

June 17, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 17, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Greeley, Col.–After lying in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy for probably more than a thousand years, ten grains of wheat sent to a Greeley farmer and planted west of here, germinated. From it eight stalks of wheat have grown and this promises a variety of wheat superior to any growing in this country.”

“The Park Is Called Jurassic Park”

June 17, 2014 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

In 1990, during the mercifully short-lived Deborah Norville era of the Today Show, Michael Crichton stops by to discuss his just-published novel, Jurassic Park.

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“Why Have Prices For Very Rare Stamps Risen So High?”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Scarcity is a reason but not the only reason why an 1856 1¢ stamp is about to sell for who knows how many millions of dollars. The opening of an explanation from the Economist:

“ON JUNE 17th the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp, the only surviving example of a penny issue printed in the South American British colony in 1856, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, a large auction house, in New York. Each of the three times it has previously been sold at auction it has set a new record for a single stamp, and the expectation this time is that it will do so again by a very wide margin. Pre-auction estimates are that it will fetch in the region of $20m, almost ten times as much as the price achieved by the current record-holder, the Treskilling Yellow, in 1996. That would make it the most valuable human artefact (by weight) ever sold, says the auction house. Why have prices for very rare stamps risen so high?

The broad reason is that number of extremely wealthy people in the world has soared in recent years.”

“I Have No Problem With Inequality Per Se”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The (relative) mania surrounding Thomas Piketty and his unlikely bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has stretched from spring to summer. From a report of his sold-out lecture on Monday in London by the Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries:

“Piketty wants us to realise that the 20th century was unusual: rapid, unrepeatable population increases that helped accelerate growth, combined with shocks (two world wars, the Great Depression) that reduced the value of capital and so kept inequalities low. These are exceptions in human history rather than the rules. The 21st century won’t be like the 20th, the professor predicts. If we don’t act, the accumulation of capital in the hands of the very few will resemble the norms in the early 19th or 18th centuries.

Someone asks Piketty if what Margaret Thatcher proposed in the 1980s was right, namely that if you reduce inequality you reduce growth. ‘I have no problem with inequality per se,’ he replies. ‘Up to a point it can be a motivation for growth. When inequalities grow more extreme, it can be no good for growth. It leads to the perpetuation of inequality. Over time that stops mobility from happening.'”

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“There Is A Fear That The Idea Machine Is Slowing Down”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

For all the flak the government takes–even by plenty of those in the government–its record of research investment is pretty spectacular. We’re not talking about only the Internet but the transistor itself, among many other innovations. As the anti-government forces have chipped away at such state-sponsored R&D, larger tech companies are trying to birth their own Bell Labs. From Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times:

“Silicon Valley, where toddler-aged companies regularly sell for billions, may be the most vibrant sector of the U.S. economy, fueling a boom in markets from housing to high-end toast (how many $4-a-slice artisanal bread bars does a place really need?). But as recent innovations — apps that summon cabs, say, or algorithms that make people click on ads — have been less than world-changing, there is a fear that the idea machine is slowing down. And while Silicon Valley mythology may suggest that modern-day innovation happens in garages and college dorm rooms, its own foundations were laid, in large part, through government research. But during the recession, government funding began to dwindle. The federal government now spends $126 billion a year on R. and D., according to the National Science Foundation. (It’s pocket change compared with the $267 billion that the private sector spends.) Asian economies now account for 34 percent of global spending; America’s share is 30 percent.

Perhaps more crucial, the invention of much of the stuff that really created jobs and energized the economy — the Internet, the mouse, smartphones, among countless other ideas — was institutionalized. Old-fashioned innovation factories, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, were financed by large companies and operated under the premise that scientists should be given large budgets, a supercomputer or two and plenty of time to make discoveries and work out the kinks of their quixotic creations. Back then, after all, Xerox and AT&T, their parent companies, made so much money that few shareholders cared about the cost. ‘It’s the unique ingredient of the U.S. business model — not just smart scientists in universities, but a critical mass of very smart scientists working in the neighborhood of commercial businesses,’ says Adrian Slywotzky, a partner at Oliver Wyman, the global management consulting firm. ‘Then that investment was cut way back.’ By the ’80s, AT&T was being taken apart by the government; Xerox PARC, like other labs, was diminished by impatient shareholders and, in some cases, the very technology it helped create.

Most of the insurgent tech companies, with their razor focus on advancing the Internet, were too preoccupied to set up their own innovation labs. They didn’t have much of an incentive either. Start-ups became so cheap to create — founders can just rent space in the cloud from Amazon instead of buying servers and buildings to house them — that it became easier and more efficient for big companies to simply buy new ideas rather than coming up with the framework for inventing them. Some of Google’s largest businesses, like Android and Maps, were acquired. ‘M. and A. is the new R. and D.’ became a popular catchphrase.

But in the past few years, the thinking has changed, and tech companies have begun looking to the past for answers. In 2010, Google opened Google X, where it is building driverless cars, Internet-connected glasses, balloons that deliver the Internet and other things straight out of science fiction.”

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“Traditional Surgery In Space Would Be A Perilous Exercise”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When earthlings start traveling to Mars, stratospheric surgery will become a necessity. From “Robotic Surgery in Space” at the Medical Bag:

“Traditional surgery in space would be a perilous exercise. Besides the difficulty of performing delicate procedures using multiple tools floating around in zero gravity, the possibility that bodily fluids could escape, float away, and contaminate equipment would be disastrous. The use of a small robot that could perform procedures in vivo would lessen these dangers. This robotic device is designed to enter the body all at once through a specialized port that would avoid loss of insufflation and reduce complexity. It would be programmed to facilitate multiple minimally invasive surgical procedures, including appendectomies, cholecystectomies, and the repair of gastric ulcer perforations and intra-abdominal bleeding due to trauma. Upon completion of the procedure, the robot can be removed easily, along with any retrieved specimens.

Currently, the device is designed to be controlled remotely by a surgeon on Earth, who would manipulate the robot inside a patient in low-Earth orbit, such as on the International Space Station. “

“The Place Radiates A Non-Human Intelligence”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A place where Wish Lists comes true, the Amazon fulfillment center is chiefly guided by intelligence that’s artificial. And that will only become truer with each passing year. From Marcus Wohlsen’s Wired article which peeks inside Bezos’ humming Phoenix warehouse:

“Through the engineering of its fulfillment centers, Amazon has built the world’s most nimble infrastructure for the transfer of things, a logistics platform that dramatically amplifies any one person’s ability to move matter to anyone else. As Amazon expands that capacity to include its own trucks and someday flying drones, the physical reach it can offer other businesses extends even further. Much in the way cloud services and the data centers that house them have become the foundation of doing business online, Amazon’s fulfillment centers have the potential to become the networked hubs of the consumer economy, the biggest of big boxes that free up businesses to focus on making things rather than moving them.

An Overarching Brain

Entering the fulfillment center in Phoenix feels like venturing into a realm where the machines, not the humans, are in charge. Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.

At 1.2 million square feet, PHX6 consists of two fulfillment operations working as mirror images of one another, a redundancy that lets the FC scale up or down in response to rising and falling demand. A central mezzanine provides panoramic views of both sides of the warehouse, the back walls obscured in the distance. An impossible-to-trace web of conveyor belts and rollers shuttle the ubiquitous yellow totes–the basic logistical units of an Amazon FC–from one point to another, filled with goods destined for warehouse shelves or for customers.

Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.”

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“Pollution Is Nothing But Resources We’re Not Harvesting”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The view From the Year 2000,” a 1971 Life article, Buckminster Fuller, ever the technological positivist, saw skies that were blue and cloudless. Our gadgets have grown much more powerful, but we’re still waiting for his future to arrive. An excerpt:

“A lot of what you’re hearing today is absolute nonsense,” he said. “The population bomb. There is no population bomb! Industrialization is the answer to the population problem. In colonial times, the average American family had 13 children, but now that we can count on the little ones growing up healthy, the average is about two. That’s evolution working–where industrialization occurs, the birth rate simply goes down. Now, of course, you have the environmentalists telling you that you can’t industrialize any further because of pollution, which is more nonsense. Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they’d be collecting.

“Margaret Mead gets quite cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing very important things because they’re so worried and excited and I’m going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we’re dealing with something much bigger than we’re accustomed to understanding, we’re on a very large course, indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there’s no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.

“These social adjustments we’re witnessing are very big. They are marvelous, the most marvelous part of the whole show. They don’t get done overnight, but they’re actually happening so fast I can’t believe it. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a fantastic amount of change, and I know we’re going through something very extraordinary in the history of the world. We’re going through some great flume, and if we will only hold on and have patience and respect the integrity of the universe itself, we’ll make it beautifully together.”•

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“The Question Is Whether Tough Times Are Here For Good”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As our society becomes more automated, we can be very productive and wealthy in the aggregate with many people being left behind. Having tens of millions of new Americans with healthcare may help drive jobs in the short run, but diagnostics, like many other areas of current employment, will soon be left to the machines. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Timothy Aeppel profiles economist frenemies Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr, who see our financial future in starkly different ways. The opening:

“EVANSTON, Ill.— Robert Gordon, a curmudgeonly 73-year-old economist, believes our best days are over. After a century of life-changing innovations that spurred growth, he says, human progress is slowing to a crawl.

Joel Mokyr, a cheerful 67-year-old economist, imagines a coming age of new inventions, including gene therapies to prolong our life span and miracle seeds that can feed the world without fertilizers.

These big-name colleagues at Northwestern University represent opposite poles in the debate over the future of the 21st century economy: rapid innovation driven by robotic manufacturing, 3-D printing and cloud computing, versus years of job losses, stagnant wages and rising income inequality.

The divergent views are more than academic. For many Americans, the recession left behind the scars of lost jobs, lower wages and depressed home prices. The question is whether tough times are here for good. The answer depends on who you ask.

‘I think the rate of innovation is just getting faster and faster,’ Mr. Mokyr said over noodles and spicy chicken at a Thai restaurant near the campus where he and Mr. Gordon have taught for four decades.

‘What’s the evidence of that?’ snapped Mr. Gordon. ‘There isn’t any.’

The men get along fine when talk is limited to, say, faculty gossip. About the future, though, they bicker constantly. When Mr. Mokyr described life-prolonging medical advances, Mr. Gordon cut in: ‘Extending life without curing Alzheimer’s means people who can walk but can’t think.'”

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“Dad Was Such A Scientific Man”

June 16, 2014 in Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Seeing the painful family dispute over Casey Kasem’s dying body reminded me of all the rumors and accusations that surrounded Ted Williams’ death a dozen years ago. The late baseball great’s grieving family experienced a serious rift when two of his children, John-Henry and Claudia, chose to have their patriarch’s remains cryonically frozen despite that action not being outlined in his will. Another child, Bobby-Jo Ferrell, disagreed vehemently with the decision. The family feud was quickly attended by lawyers and a media furor. 

Claudia, a nurse, has just published a book to try to address what she believes are misconceptions about the controversy. She recently sat for an interview with ESPN’s Buster Olney, contending that her father had an abiding interest in cryonics, which stemmed in part from his friendship with astronaut John Glenn. Olney asks absolutely zero tough questions, which is disappointing, but here’s a transcript of Claudia Williams’ comments:

“Daddy met John Glenn when he was flying in Korea. He actually was his wingman. Daddy would protect John Glenn wherever he was flying. Dad flew in back because pilots oftentimes can’t see very well behind them, so that was Dad’s responsibility. John Glenn is quoted as saying Dad was one of the best pilots he had ever seen. They forged a friendship during the Korean War, and throughout their whole lives they stayed friends, and when it came time for John Glenn to go back up in space, you know, the two of them got together and started talking, and the stories that they shared are probably one of the reasons we became even more interested than we already were in science. A lot of people don’t realize this but they did an extensive amount of research and tests on John Glenn when he went up in space, and it was all related to aging and reversing the aging process. Now think about that–that’s huge. And Dad became very interested in that, very intrigued, and he kept telling John-Henry, ‘You get on that World Wide Web of yours because I want to know exactly what’s going on with John, I want to know what they’re doing, everything they’re researching.’ … It’s not like we woke up one day and said, ‘You know, we’re all going to get cryogenically preserved.’ No, not at all. It was a journey. It’s a transition that happened through life and life’s painful experiences that we finally got to that point, and especially since you consider, you know, we didn’t grow up with religion, and Dad was such a scientific man.”

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