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“Now Even Doctors Face The Looming Threat Of Possible Obsolescence”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Tom Meltzer’s new Guardian article about the advent of upwardly mobile robots leaving the assembly line for information-rich jobs:

“Last year, reporters for the Associated Press attempted to figure out which jobs were being lost to new technology. They analysed employment data from 20 countries and interviewed experts, software developers and CEOs. They found that almost all the jobs that had disappeared in the past four years were not low-skilled, low-paid roles, but fairly well-paid positions in traditionally middle-class careers. Software was replacing administrators and travel agents, bookkeepers and secretaries, and at alarming rates.

Economists and futurists know it’s not all doom and gloom, but it is all change. Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne have predicted computerisation could make nearly half of jobs redundant within 10 to 20 years. Office work and service roles, they wrote, were particularly at risk. But almost nothing is impervious to automation. It has swept through shop floors and factories, transformed businesses big and small, and is beginning to revolutionise the professions.

Knowledge-based jobs were supposed to be safe career choices, the years of study it takes to become a lawyer, say, or an architect or accountant, in theory guaranteeing a lifetime of lucrative employment. That is no longer the case. Now even doctors face the looming threat of possible obsolescence.”

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“Let’s Turn To That Miracle Of The Modern Age, The Electronic Brain UNIVAC”

June 14, 2014 in Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

The Univac 1 computer got off to a good start in 1952 when it predicted that Eisenhower would win easily over Stevenson even though the press thought the reverse outcome was a near-certainty. It faltered a bit in the 1954 midterm Senate races and was mocked. (“Tilt!” was hollered in the newsroom by one wiseass when it became clear that the prognostications were errant.) But by the 1956 Presidential election, the computer once more nailed the Eisenhower triumph over Stevenson. No TV broadcast of any major election ever went without a computer again. 

In this 1952 clip, Walter Cronkite cedes the floor the machine which at this early point in the night thought Eisenhower was a 100-1 favorite to win. Nervous CBS brass were so concerned that the “electronic brain” was wrong that they initially pretended it had mechanical difficulties and was being unresponsive.

“To Test This Theory In The Real World, We Can Study Penalty Kicks”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The effect of the World Cup on the Brazilian economy will be studied from every and any angle, but even within the game itself, some economic principles can be tested. From Ignacio Palacios-Huerta’s New York Times article, “The Beautiful Data Set“:

“The economist John Forbes Nash Jr. analyzed how people should behave in strategic situations in which it is not optimal to repeatedly make the same move — like the children’s game rock, paper, scissors, in which selecting one move again and again (rock, rock, rock …) makes you easy to beat. According to Mr. Nash’s theory, in a zero-sum game (i.e., where a win for one player entails a corresponding loss for the other) the best approach is to vary your moves unpredictably and in such proportions that your probability of winning is the same for each move. In rock, paper, scissors, for example, the optimal strategy is to mix your choices randomly among the three options.

To test this theory in the real world, we can study penalty kicks, which are zero-sum games in which it is not optimal to repeatedly choose the same move. (The goalie has an easier time stopping your shot if you always kick to the same side of the net.) Unlike complex real-world strategic situations involving firms, banks or countries, penalty kicks are relatively simple, and data about them are readily available.

I analyzed 9,017 penalty kicks taken in professional soccer games in a variety of countries from September 1995 to June 2012. I found, as Mr. Nash’s theory would predict, that players typically distributed their shots unpredictably and in just the right proportions. Specifically, roughly 60 percent of kicks were made to the right of the net, and 40 percent to the left. The proportions were not 50-50 because players have unequal strengths in their legs and tend to shoot better to one side. Shooting 50-50, in other words, would not take full advantage of their better leg, while shooting any more often to the stronger side would have been too predictable.

In accordance with Mr. Nash’s theory, penalty kicks shot to the left were successful with the same frequency as kicks shot to the right — roughly 80 percent of the time.”

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“The Appeal Of Vinyl Is A Mysterious Thing”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I don’t collect books or records or anything. I love well-designed, beautiful things that make me happy, but I don’t have a deep need to own them. (Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, photographed in 1971 by Julian Wasser, disagreed with me on this matter.) From a Guardian piece about the value of vinyl by Marc Maron, who seems wonderful from a distance:

“The appeal of vinyl is a mysterious thing. Even when you talk to people who make records, who know how the sound gets from the groove to the stylus into the amp and out through the speakers, it’s still kind of magical, in some weird way. The idea of analog, even with its crackle and pops, the idea of this sound being pulled off this rotating disc through these other elements, I think there’s integrity to that, as opposed to this mystifying sequence of zeroes and ones that make that digital sound. I have no idea how the hell that works. It seems detached, inhuman.

At some point in the last two years, I got a renewed interest in playing records. I’d had turntables before, and I had a box of records that I’d been carting around since high school. I always knew in the back of my head that records had more integrity than digital music. I went to interview Jack White at his place in Nashville, and he’s a real analog guy. He had these Mackintosh tube amps, and I got hung up on the idea of getting a tube amp, but the ones Jack had were $15,000. There was no way I could spend that kind of money on stereo equipment and enjoy it; I’d always be thinking, does this sound like $15,000? I don’t think so.

I’ve got around 2,000 records now, and I play music constantly.”

_____________________________

“Are you fed up with constantly searching for the records you want?”

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“Apparently We Can Bounce Back From Some Awful Experiences”

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

Some people with tremendous struggles are happy and some with uncommon good luck are bitter. A lot in the latter group have egos blocking out the sun.

And expectations also matter. They can often be adjusted as we respond to the stimuli we encounter, as we grow to accept a new normal. But there are some things that make us miserable no matter how we look at them. From Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece about so-called “happynomics”:

“It turns out that we grow accustomed to some conditions, happy or unhappy, but not to all.

The study which sparked the idea that we can get used to almost anything was published by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in 1978. It compared the happiness of paraplegic and quadriplegic accident victims to that of lottery winners – and discovered that the disabled people were scarcely less happy than the millionaires. Apparently we can bounce back from some awful experiences. (It is sad and troubling that a few years after making this discovery, Brickman killed himself.)

But how exactly is this apparent process of habituation supposed to work? Here’s where happiness economics has the long-run data to help. Consider bereavement: we cope by paying less attention as time goes by. A friend said to me, months after my mother and his father had both died, ‘You don’t get any less sad when you think about them but you think about them less often.’

The same is true, alas, for the nice things in life: we begin to take them for granted too. But there are experiences – unemployment is one of them; an unhappy marriage another – that depress us for as long as they last. What those experiences seem to have in common is the ability to hold our attention. Commuting, although shorter and less serious, is a classic case – annoying but also stimulating enough that we keep noticing the annoyance.

This suggests that we should look for the opposite of commuting: positive new experiences that are engaging enough to keep being noticed.”

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“You Don’t Know Who You’re Gonna Get, But You Know It’s Going To Be A Celebrity”

June 13, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

That joker Alan Abel plays pranks that work because beneath the ridiculous set-ups and crude one-liners there’s an understanding of our desires and fears. In this ridiculous interview from basic cable decades ago, he satirized our wish for fame, youth and immortality, marrying the emerging celebrity culture to new scientific possibilities. He pretended that he’d created a sperm bank in which only stars like John Wayne and Johnny Carson were allowed to make deposits. And he was going to cryogenically freeze a young woman and tour her body across America. Everyone would be a star and live forever.

A Note From 1929 About Huge Robotic Fireflies

June 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 20, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Artificial fireflies the size of turkeys which will give off brilliant perpetual light without the vexation of meters, monthly bills and repairs were forecast last night in an address on ‘Living Lamps’ before the American Institute in Cooper Union by Dr. E. Newton Harvey, professor of psychology at Princeton University.

And whereas the firefly of nature only flashes, burning up the tiny amount of ‘oil’ in its lamp and then staying dark again until it has reformed its ‘oil,’ the robot firefly would be so contrived as to give a continuous glow, reforming a part of its ‘oil,’ which is technically called ‘luciferin,’ while it was burning the rest, this being an incessant process.”

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“Is This Girl Going To Have A Normal Life?”

June 12, 2014 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Fertilizing a human egg in a test tube was considered verboten and scary by many when the first child to be conceived in this fashion, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. Ethicists and religious figures questioned the process. All the fuss seems silly in retrospect, and the procedure is now just another way to have a baby. Louise indeed has had a normal life, as a nurse and postal worker and mom (the in vivo kind), despite a continuous crush of press interview requests. Here she is a lively child of 14 months on a Canadian talk show with her mom and dad.

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“It Has The Potential To Decrease Private Car Ownership”

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

At the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo wonders whether Uber, for all the very reasonable doubts about the service, could cause a serious decrease in private car ownership, which would have huge ramifications for not just transportation but also housing and environment. An excerpt:

“It is impossible to say whether Uber is worth the $17 billion its investors believe it to be; like any start-up, it could fail. But for all its flaws, Uber is anything but trivial. It could well transform transportation the way Amazon has altered shopping — by using slick, user-friendly software and mountains of data to completely reshape an existing market, ultimately making many modes of urban transportation cheaper, more flexible and more widely accessible to people across the income spectrum.

Uber could pull this off by accomplishing something that has long been seen as a pipe dream among transportation scholars: It has the potential to decrease private car ownership.

In its long-established markets, like San Francisco, using Uber every day is already arguably cheaper than owning a private car.”

“I’m Actually Not A Big Fan Of The Term ‘Sixth Extinction'”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At Vox, Brad Plumer interviews Duke biologist Stuart Pimm about his new paper on the acceleration of extinctions in the time of human beings. But he didn’t publish only about what will perish–he believes there’s also the option for us to avoid destroying diversity and perhaps our own species. An excerpt:

“Vox:

So extinction rates are higher now that humans are around. Why? What are we doing?

Stuart Pimm:

There are four big factors here. The first one, which is overwhelmingly important, is habitat destruction. We’re destroying the habitats where species are. About two-thirds of all species on land are in tropical rainforests — and we’re shrinking those rain forests.

In the Americas, the greatest numbers of species on the brink of extinction are in the coastal forests of Brazil and the northern Andes and Ecuador. If you look at the coastal forests of Brazil, east of Rio de Janeiro, something like 95 percent of all forest has been destroyed. So it’s not surprising that that part of the world has an unusual number of endangered species.

Second, we’re also warming the climate, and as it gets warmer species either have to move toward the poles or up mountains. This could be a big one in the future.

Third, we’ve been incredibly careless about moving species around the world. I’m in the Florida Everglades, where there are an obscene number of Burmese pythons slithering around, which can not do any good. So invasive species is a third.

Finally, particularly in the oceans, there’s just overharvesting. We’ve depleted the oceans by fishing and more fishing and yet more fishing, and driving species to the very brink of extinction.

Vox:

So the historical record shows that there have five mass extinction events in the Earth’s history. And lots of people keep suggesting we’re on the verge of a sixth. But what’s the criteria for this? How would we know?

Stuart Pimm:

I’m actually not a big fan of the term ‘sixth extinction.’ But we are certainly seeing a highly accelerated rate of extinction.

If that continues — and continues for many decades — then by the end of the century we are going to lose one-third or one-half of all species. And that kind of loss in biological diversity hasn’t been seen in 60 million years. The last time we lost that many species was when an asteroid plowed into the Yucatán in Mexico. So if trends continue, then yes, we are going to lose a large fraction of species.

But what the paper is about mostly, is ways in which we can avoid that. So yes it’s bad, but the paper is full of important news about how we can make a difference.”

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“Technology Leadership Is Not Defined By Patents”

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

There’ve been rumors for awhile that Elon Musk was going to withdraw the patents for all his Tesla EV technology and open-source the previously proprietary information. That has come to pass, and it makes great business sense as well as being altruistic and progressive. If you were trying to popularize electric cars, wouldn’t you want a robust industry to be a part of? That way other companies will be producing innovations and nurturing talent and providing competition. It might be different if large manufacturers were deep into the game, but, sadly, they’re not. Also: Fewer patents mean fewer lawsuits. The Tesla press release:

“Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. 

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.”

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“We Will Need Robots To Help Us Deal With This Reality”

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

Technological progress has historically meant more jobs, but is the new normal of potential mass automation the first exception to that rule? Maybe, maybe not. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the focuses of Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, believes we won’t see a net loss. From Brooks at the Harvard Business Review:

“Over the next 40 years, we are going to see a dramatic drop in the percentage of working-age adults across the world. And as baby boomers reach retirement age, the percentage of folks in retirement is going to change dramatically in the opposite direction. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services, and fewer working people available to deliver those services to them.

We will need robots to help us deal with this reality, doing the things we normally do for ourselves but that get harder to do as we get older. Things like getting groceries, driving cars to visit people, and helping us move around more safely and efficiently as physical ailments settle in.

Before you dismiss this vision for a highly automated society, think about it the next time you put a load of laundry into your washing machine or hit the start button on the dishwasher as you head off to bed. These are tools that have automated unpleasant and time-consuming aspects of our lives, and given us more free time to pursue more productive or pleasurable activities.

A generation ago, these machines were looked at with skepticism and sometimes ridicule. Today, they are staples of modern life that most of us would be hard-pressed to live without. I hope and fully believe we will be saying the same thing about robots a generation from now.”

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Old Print Article: “Office Serves Coffee in Pneumatic Tubes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933)

June 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“I have my manias, and I impose them.”

Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s Air Minister, created an experimental office environment that was a technocrat’s dream, humming with gizmos, even if it shared some of the fascist tendencies of his politics. There was an Automat-style lunchroom and a tubing system that delivered coffee to desks, which was wonderful provided you weren’t aging, sickly or disabled. Then you weren’t allowed to work there. An article from the February 23, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paris–Fascist Air Minister Italo Balbo of Italy, soon to fly to America with 20 planes, has hot coffee shot up to his office through pneumatic tubes. So in fact do all the 2,000 clerks and other personnel of his ministry.

This is but one of the fantasies that the 36-year-old, prematurely bearded air minister (possible successor to Mussolini) has incorporated in the newest of Rome’s government buildings.

In spite of his youth he is probably the dean of the world’s air ministers, since he is in his sixth year of office. To Claude Blanchard whom he showed around the building, he stated that he had deep dislike for ordinary government offices.

‘I have my manias, and I impose them,’ he laughed. ‘There is not a drawer in the building.’ He explained that his first four years in politics gave him a horror of desk drawers.

Blanchard describes the ministry as a combination of ‘factory, museum, laboratory, gymnasium, restaurant, bank, university and storehouse.’

Every desk has a telephone and a pneumatic tube such as department stores use to shoot change from customer to cashier and back. The elevators are endless chain affairs which never stop; and on and off which passengers leap while they are in motion.

No Gray Hairs In Sight

There are no paralytics or rheumatics in the ministry. Blanchard said that he did not see one gray hair. 

Balbo, while visiting Chicago, 1933.

Balbo’s own office is a wide bright room, the walls of which are decorated with huge maps painted in the seventeenth century manner. While they were talking something like a steamboat whistle blew; and the minister invited the guest to lunch.

After a descent in the non-stop elevators they came out in an immense stand-up lunch room, in which everybody from the minister down to the workmen in aprons and overalls eat at once. They all pay for it, the minister and upper ranks paying 32 cents and the men in overalls seven. Forty-five minutes are allowed for lunch. Blanchard, between Balbo and a high staff officer, lined up at one of the long nickel and porcelain shelves, opened the small nickeled doors in front of him. There, kept hot by electricity, was the whole meal.

It was not a completely standardized meal. The menu had been circulated earlier in the morning and everybody had shot back his order by pneumatic tube.

In fifteen minutes the lunch was over and everybody flowed around to a colossal bar filled with glittering coffee ‘espresso’ machines. Each made his own coffee; and it was there that Balbo showed with some pride the system by which the clerks get coffee in their offices without leaving their desks. A clerk shoots an order down the tube with his desk number on it; and in a moment a sealed bottle with the coffee in it plops out of the tube.

It is a good ministry to work in. It closes at a quarter to four.”

 

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“He Wanted The Woman – And Two Cats – To Be The First To Walk On The Moon”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Speaking of the Guardian, that publication’s Karin Andreasson’s has a new article about Edward Makuka Nkoloso, a Don Quixote of the Age of Aquarius, who was the self-appointed leader of Zambia’s unlikely entry into the 1960s Space Race. He desired not only to go to the moon but to establish a Christian ministry on Mars. An excerpt:

In 1964, when Zambia gained its independence from the UK, Nkoloso, a science teacher, decided to prove that his country was just as important as the world’s leading nations. It was the height of the space race and he decided Zambia should take part. He designed a rocket and a catapult system to launch it, which he tested on Zambian Independence Day. He recruited 10 men and one woman as astronauts. He wanted the woman – and two cats – to be the first to walk on the moon.

Training took place on a farm near the capital, Lusaka. Nkoloso asked for £7m of funding from Unesco, but didn’t get it. That was one reason why the programme didn’t have a chance. Then the woman became pregnant by one of the other astronauts and her parents came to take her back to their village. And that marked the end of the space programme. People I have spoken to who met Nkoloso say he was very charismatic: a dreamer who took his project very seriously, maybe even with the same serious approach Nasa and the Soviet Union had.•

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“His Is An Absolute, Pre-Modern Sort Of Power, Faith-Based And Exclusionary”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In his latest compulsively readable GQ article, “What Does the Future Hold for the Guardian?” Michael Wolff analyzes the British publication’s attempt to globalize itself and win the United States, to less-than-mixed financial results. The Snowden story, as important as it may have been, could not be monetized, and the company continues to hemorrhage cash. Wolff finds the the Guardian’s singular editor, Alan Rusbridger, “unpleasant” in his lack of transparency, whereas Wolff is unpleasant for the opposite reason. An excerpt about Rusbridger, who, by virtue of the publication’s unusual financial arrangement, is a throwback to an earlier era:

“While the Guardian has a business staff with a CEO, and is overseen by trustees with ultimate responsibility, it has one real power centre, strategic thinker and moral compass: its editor, Alan Rusbridger. (A kind of preternatural consensus surrounds Rusbridger, but underneath him the Guardian is a fraught political cauldron, with underlings struggling to align with him, stay in his favour and undercut everyone else who is trying: ‘a nest of vipers,’ in the description of an outside consultant brought in to work on one of the paper’s big redesign projects.)

The 60-year-old Rusbridger is, surely, among the most talented newspaper editors of his generation (the other, at the opposite end of the news and philosophical spectrum, is Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail) and, as well, the most opaque, sending cryptic messages in a cipher which no one person can completely decode.

An hour with him is both unpleasant in the exertions required to penetrate his lack of transparency and fill the conversational void and, yet, at the same time, uplifting and restorative. The vacuum that surrounds him somehow seems to represent moral superiority and it draws you in. Six different people of high rank at the paper have said to me, on different occasions, the following words: ‘I would do anything for Alan.’ These are not words you usually hear in a modern company; they are not even credible. But they suggest the Guardian’s sense of purpose and the potency of its Kool-Aid. (I once sat next to Rusbridger’s wife at a Guardian dinner; she kept referencing what seemed like a wholly different person, a normal, fallible, workaday chap named ‘Al.’ Weird.)

His is an absolute, pre-modern sort of power, faith-based and exclusionary. You believe or you don’t. You are in or you are out. You are family or you are not. Emily Bell, once a potential Rusbridger successor, who was at the Guardian for the better part of two decades (coming in through the Guardian’s acquisition of the Observer- ever an unresolved relationship), told me, after she left several years ago to take a teaching position in the US, “I never really was an insider.”

Rusbridger has run the place since 1995 and, in some less-than-rational way, its future exists wholly in his head or at his whim. Not only is there enormous deference to him and dependence on him, but a sense of the abyss at any suggestion that he might leave (he is often suggested for eminent positions at places like the Royal Opera House).

Rusbridger has maintained two dominant ideas about the Guardian’s future: going digital and going to the US.”

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“Sport Originally Evolved As A Way Of Showing Off Our Genetic Fitness”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

There are hundreds of baseball players who’ve gotten special dispensation to use amphetamines in one form or another for “medical reasons,” which makes little sense. Yet a player trying to rehab from a legitimate injury with use of HGH under a doctor’s guidance isn’t allowed to do so. There are enough loopholes and inconsistencies in every sport’s drug policy to boggle the mind. 

From “A Doping Manifesto,” Julian Savulescu’s Aeon argument in favor of the allowance of some sorts of PEDS:

“Sport originally evolved as a way of showing off our genetic fitness. Displaying great speed, strength, intelligence, ingenuity and co-ordination in public demonstrated to potential mates your capability to survive and reproduce. It appears that we haven’t come far. One French study by Charlotte Faurie, Dominique Pontier and Michel Raymond published in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2004 reported that: ‘Both male and female students who compete in sports reported significantly higher numbers of partners than other students, and within the athletes, higher levels of performance predicted more partners.’ Perhaps because of the status bestowed by athletic prowess, sportsmanship – the spirit of sport – has come to embody the values we promote in society as a whole. As Dick Pound of WADA said: ‘You respect the rules, you respect your opponents, you respect yourself. You play fair. I think that bleeds over into life as well.’

The values behind the spirit of sport are defined by WADA as: ethics, fair play and honesty; health; excellence in performance; character and education; fun and joy; teamwork; dedication and commitment; respect for rules and laws; respect for self and other participants; courage; and community and solidarity.

Sport is meant to show humans ‘at their best’. It allows us to demonstrate determination, striving, struggling and conquering. Sport is also meant to capture the human spirit. That’s why, the argument goes, if doping were legal it would still be cheating, because sport would no longer be testing those fundamental human virtues and capacities, but would merely showcase the wonders of the modern pharmaceutical industry (or your other favourite supplier of dope).

Yet doping is not always contrary to these values.”

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“How Much Safer Would Driving Be If Robots Replaced Humans On The Roads?”

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

When paying a bill online recently, I mistakenly entered one wrong letter in my password, and the system locked me out, thinking I was someone else trying to break into my account. I had to phone the company and speak to two tech people before I was re-allowed entry. Sometimes technology can read something innocent as something sinister and overreact in the name of safety.

They’ll be glitches, some unforeseen, when the road begins to crowd with autonomous cars, as there always are with any technological innovation, but on balance driving will be safer. The question is by how much. From Clare Cain Miller of the New York Times:

“How much safer would driving be if robots replaced humans on the roads?

It has been hard to estimate because fully autonomous cars are not yet available to test. Google says that its driverless cars have logged more than 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the car, and that its cars do not do unsafe things that people do, like sharply accelerating or braking.

But two studies by researchers at Virginia Tech — H. Clay Gabler, a professor of biomedical engineering, and Kristofer D. Kusano, a research associate — suggest how much safer robot cars might be. They found that even cars that are not fully autonomous but that automate some of the most dangerous aspects of driving could have as big an effect as seatbelts have had.

The studies, which were sponsored in part by Toyota Motor, analyzed the crashes, injuries and fatalities that could have been prevented by cars that alert drivers when they drift out of their lane or correct the car’s course, and those that sense an impending collision and automatically brake. They used a representative sample of real-world crashes nationwide and simulated what would have happened had the automation been in place.

They found that lane-departure warning systems would have prevented 30.3 percent of the crashes caused by lane drifting, and 25.8 percent of the injuries.”

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“The Benefits And Profits Of The Future Will Go To Those Who Plan Ahead Now”

June 10, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In regards to the Boeing’s misbegotten SST jet which I just mentioned, this 1967 company promotional film was wrong about supersonic travel but right more broadly about the near-term future of commercial aviation.

“The supersonic jet will change everything you know about flying,” 1968:

“The World Cup In Brazil Will Be The Biggest Media Event In History”

June 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

From “What Does Soccer Mean Today,” Ryan O’Hanlon’s Pacific Standard interview with writer Simon Kuper, an exchange about the effect of globalization on the world’s game, which has made interest somewhat shallower but much wider:

“Pacific Standard:

Some have said that this globalization has lessened the importance of the World Cup. Basically, anyone with an Internet connection can watch any game. And with club soccer, they’re watching better, more cohesive teams. Where do you see the World Cup fitting within all that?

Simon Kuper:

It’s still the most meaningful for players and for fans, so your career can be made in a minute. You score a brilliant goal or you score a terrible own goal at the World Cup, and that marks you for the rest of your life just because of the interest and the meaning that people attach to it is still much higher—even though all the things you say are true. What’s special about the World Cup—if you go back to before the World Cup in the U.S., very few Americans were interested, very few Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Indonesians, so really, the biggest countries in the world were excluded. And now each World Cup really is a World Cup, so in that sense it’s much more wider and deeper than it used to be. And I think that’s quite thrilling: The idea that when somebody plays, he’s watched by people literally all over the world. It’s the most uniting event in our planet’s history, given the increase in global communication. The World Cup in Brazil will be the biggest media event in history, judged by numbers of viewers and numbers of clicks, and there’s something majestic about that.”

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“The City Has Become A Vast Pawnshop”

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

Could a few entrepreneurs, even wildly successful ones like Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos, rescue an entire city from collapse? A new essay by Andrew Yang in Fast Company, “The Entrepreneurs Who Saved Seattle,” credits the Microsoft and Amazon founders almost wholly with Seattle’s renaissance. The openings of Yang’s article and “City of Despair,” the 1971 Economist piece he references, which interestingly demonstrates the downside of a company town.

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From “The Entrepreneurs Who Saved Seattle,” 2014:

“Today, Seattle is considered one of the most desirable places to live and work in the U.S. Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia, and other leading companies make their homes there.

But in 1979, Seattle was the last place you’d think to find a growth business. It had more in common with today’s Rust Belt than Silicon Valley–its economy centered on a declining manufacturing base and the lumber industry, both of which were shedding jobs. Starbucks was just a tiny local company with three stores serving standard-issue coffee. The Economist had labeled Seattle the ‘city of despair’ and a billboard appeared saying “Will the last person leaving Seattle–turn off the lights.’

So what changed? Two Seattle natives decided to move their 13-employee company there in 1979 from Albuquerque. The two natives were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And the company was Microsoft.

Is it possible to ascribe Seattle’s entire economic trajectory to just one company? Well, today over 40,000 people work at Microsoft in the region, and 28,000 of them are highly paid engineers. Approximately 4,000 businesses have been started by Microsoft alumni, many of which are in the region. Just one of these companies, RealNetworks, employs 1,500 people. Expedia, originally a Microsoft spinoff, employs another 14,000. The Gates Foundation itself has another several hundred employees. The economist Enrico Moretti estimates that Microsoft’s growth has directly created 120,000 regional jobs for services workers with limited educations (cleaners, taxi drivers, carpenters, hairdressers, real estate agents, etc.) and another 80,000 jobs for workers with college degrees (teachers, nurses, doctors, architects).

The growth of Microsoft also influenced Jeff Bezos to locate Amazon there in 1994 when he was looking for a city with ample tech talent to build an e-commerce company. Today, about 17,000 of Amazon’s 51,000 employees live and work in the Seattle region. If Microsoft had not been there, Bezos could easily have migrated elsewhere.”

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From “City of Despair,” 1971:

“The country’s best buys in used cars, in secondhand television sets, in houses, are to be found in Seattle, Washington. The city has become a vast pawnshop, with families selling anything they can do without to get money to buy food and pay the rent. Even restaurant meals are a bargain: a two for the price of one is offered to customers in smart, half-empty eating places.

More than 100,000 people are out of work in the Seattle area, which many people think is the worst example of economic decline in any sector of America since the great depression 40 years ago. Unemployment in Seattle stands officially at 13.1 per cent of the labour force, more than double the national level, Unofficially the welfare workers closest to the people put it at twice that high.

The root of the problem lies in the economic dominance of the area by one giant corporation, the Boeing Company. Two years ago its sales of aircraft were booming but now Boeing is undergoing a continuing attrition of government and civilian contracts. The halt in the development of the SST, America’s projected Supersonic aircraft, was merely the latest of many blows. Boeing’s payroll of 106,000 two years ago is down to 40,000 and the company acknowledges that it will cut employment further this year, probably to 29,000. The decline would not ave been halted even if the Senate had voted this week to revive the SST.”

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“The Real Value And Insight Comes From The Data That These Devices Provide”

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

A little more about the Internet of Things, that rough beast waiting to be born, from Luke Dormehl at the Guardian:

“What unites products as seemingly disparate as driverless cars and fitness-tracking wearables such as the Jawbone UP is their ability to collect data from, and on behalf of, their users.

‘When people talk about the Internet of Things, they tend to get hung up on the ‘things’ themselves,’ says Ian Foddering, chief technology officer and technical director at Cisco UK and Ireland. ‘Actually, the real value and insight comes from the data that these devices provide. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is possible in terms of data extraction. It’s a very exciting time.’

‘Data empowers us,’ says Renee Blodgett, vice president of marketing and strategy at Kolibree, the world’s first connected electric toothbrush (yes, really!). ‘For the first time, we have data on how we brush our teeth, where we brush our teeth and where we need to improve. Before now, we would only get that feedback from our dentist once a year when we have our annual cleaning. Now, we can get that feedback in real time.’

While marginal gains in toothbrushing might not sound like much, the overall point about the power of big data is certainly valid.”

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Old Print Article: “Berol, Mind Wizard, Dies; Cause Mystery,” New York Times (1914)

June 9, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before computers became our “second brains,” there were stage performers paid well for displaying astonishing feats of memory. Such was the career of a Horatio Alger-esque immigrant from a century ago, Felix Berol, who allegedly retained hundreds of thousands of fascinating facts and used them to wow vaudeville crowds and teach memory retention via correspondence courses. From an article about his sudden death in the April 20, 1914 Brooklyn Daily Eagle (which doesn’t mention that Berol had willed his brain to the Philadelphia Medical Association):

“Felix Berol, ‘the man with 300,00 facts in his head,’ who was conceded to be one of the world’s greatest memory training experts, died suddenly at 2 a.m. today at his home, 609 Fairview Avenue, Ridgewood Heights.

Mr. Berol and his wife and his niece, Miss Ellie Kosch, returned from Coney Island shortly after midnight, and after a late supper he retired. Shortly before he died he called to his wife and complained of feeling ill, and suddenly collapsed in her arms.

Although heart disease is supposed to have been the cause of death, an autopsy will be performed by a coroner’s physician this afternoon to determine exactly what he died from.

The news of Mr. Berol’s death came as a shock to the members of the Central and Bedford branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association, where only a week ago he gave the first of a series of nine lectures on memory training. He was to have given the second lecture of the course at the Bedford Branch tonight, and at the Central Branch tomorrow night. Unless some former pupil who completed the course at the West Side Branch of the Y.M.C.A. undertakes the lectures, the course may be abandoned.

Mr. Berol attended the dance of the Young Women’s Christian Association at the Central Branch on Schermerhorn Street last Saturday night, and was then apparently in the best of health. He danced several times, and didn’t appear to be the least bit fatigued when he departed for his home early Sunday morning. It was his boast that he had never been sick a day in his life, and he attributed his good health to the fact that he constantly exercised his mind.

In addition to lecturing at the Y.M.C.A. branches, Mr. Berol was conducting a correspondence course through Funk & Wagnalls, the publishers, and had 2,500 pupils.

Mr. Berol was born in Berlin, Germany, on February 1, 1872. He got an education in the public schools of Berlin and came to this country when a boy. His mind was sluggish and dull, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could remember a fact. As a result, the best kind of job the young immigrant boy could land was washing dishes in a cheap restaurant.

One night, tired and sleepy, he sauntered into Cooper Union and picked up a book at random. It was Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and, as he turned the pages, he was for the first time in his life interested in reading.

By reading Progress and Poverty, Berol’s whole career was changed. From then on, he thirsted for knowledge, and, realizing that his mentality was exceedingly dull and that he couldn’t remember anything he read, he started to hunt up books on memory. He haunted Cooper Union, the Astor Library and other libraries in his spare time, devouring everything pertaining to memory that he could lay his hands on. After months of hard work, he mastered the principles of the subject as laid down by teachers of memories. Within seven months he was able to perform astonishing feats of remembering and branched out in vaudeville as ‘Berol, the Mental Marvel, With 5,000 Facts in His Head.’ His success was instantaneous; he was booked as a headliner and commanded big salaries, which made a fortune for him.

At a big financial sacrifice, he abandoned the stage to devote his time to educational work in the teaching of his wonderful but simple memory training system.

Berol actually had 300,000 facts in his head, any one of which he could name in an instant. He could give exact dates of births and deaths of great men, the date of every battle in the history of the world, and the population of every city and town in the United States of more than 5,000, and thousands upon thousands of statistics.”•

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“Injecting The Dolphins With LSD Was Not Something Lovatt Was In Favor Of”

June 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even for the 1960s, neuroscientist and LSD experimenter John Lilly was far out there (see here and here and here). His interspecies communication research with dolphins for NASA gradually came to include providing the creatures with interspecies sex and psychedelic drugs. From Christopher Riley’s eye-popping Guardian article about Margaret Howe Lovatt, a young woman who lived with the dolphin named Peter until the project capsized:

“In the 1960s a small selection of neuroscientists like John Lilly were licensed to research LSD by the American government, convinced that the drug had medicinal qualities that could be used to treat mental-health patients. As part of this research, the drug was sometimes injected into animals and Lilly had been using it on his dolphins since 1964, curious about the effect it would have on them.

Much to Lilly’s annoyance, nothing happened. Despite his various attempts to get the dolphins to respond to the drug, it didn’t seem to have any effect on them, remembers Lovatt. ‘Different species react to different pharmaceuticals in different ways,’ explains the vet, Andy Williamson. ‘A tranquilliser made for horses might induce a state of excitement in a dog. Playing with pharmaceuticals is a tricky business to say the least.’

Injecting the dolphins with LSD was not something Lovatt was in favour of and she insisted that the drug was not given to Peter, which Lilly agreed to. But it was his lab, and they were his animals, she recalls. And as a young woman in her 20s she felt powerless to stop him giving LSD to the other two dolphins.

While Lilly’s experimentation with the drug continued, Lovatt persevered with Peter’s vocalisation lessons and grew steadily closer to him. ‘That relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being together, and wanting to be together, and missing him when he wasn’t there,’ she reflects. ‘I did have a very close encounter with – I can’t even say a dolphin again – with Peter.’

By autumn 1966, Lilly’s interest in the speaking-dolphin experiment was dwindling. ‘It didn’t have the zing to it that LSD did at that time,’ recalls Lovatt of Lilly’s attitude towards her progress with Peter. ‘And in the end the zing won.'”

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“We’ll Fight Till We’re Dead Or We’re Free”

June 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some will always leave the culture, go off by themselves or in pairs or groups. They’ll disappear into their own heads, create their own reality. For most it’s benign, but not for all. There are those who don’t want to live parallel to the larger society and come to believe they can end it. The deeper they retreat, the harder it is to reemerge. Instead they sometimes explode back into their former world, as in the case of Jerad and Amanda Miller committing acts of domestic terrorism in Las Vegas. It reminds me of a piece of reportage by Denis Johnson.

The writer was paranoid about both the government and the anti-government militia movement in 1990s America when he wrote the chilling article “The Militia in Me,” which appears in his non-fiction collection, Seek. The violence of Ruby Ridge and Waco and the horrific Oklahoma City bombing had shocked the nation into realizing the terror within, so Johnson traveled the U.S. and Canada to find out how and why militias had come to be. Three brief excerpts from the piece.

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The people I talked with seemed to imply that the greatest threat to liberty came from a conspiracy, or several overlapping conspiracies, well known to everybody but me. As a framework for thought, this has its advantages. It’s quicker to call a thing a crime and ask Who did it? than to call it a failure and set about answering the question What happened?

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I’m one among many, part of a disparate–sometimes better spelled “desperate”–people, self-centered, shortsighted, stubborn, sentimental, richer than anybody’s ever been, trying to get along in the most cataclysmic century in human history. Many of us are troubled that somewhere, somehow, the system meant to keep us free has experienced a failure. A few believe that someone has committed the crime of sabotaging everything.

Failures need correction. Crimes cry out for punishment. Some ask: How do we fix it? Others: Who do we kill?

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They told me they made furniture out of antlers and drove around anywhere and everywhere, selling it. For the past month I’d been reading about the old days, missing them as if I had lived in them, and I said, “You sound like free Americans.”

“No,” the smaller man said and thereafter did all the talking, while the other, the blond driver changed my tire. “No American is free today.”

“Okay, I guess you’re right, but what do we do about that?”

“We fight till we are,” he said. “Till we’re free or we’re dead, one or the other.”

“Who’s going to do the fighting?”

“A whole lot of men. More than you’d imagine. We’ll fight till we’re dead or we’re free.”•

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“Writing Is Cognitively Unnatural”

June 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

 

 

William Faulkner.

Two brief excerpts from “Writing in the 21st Century,” a thought-provoking Edge piece about the nature of composition by Steven Pinker.

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“The first thing you should think about is the stance that you as a writer take when putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Writing is cognitively unnatural. In ordinary conversation, we’ve got another person across from us. We can monitor the other person’s facial expressions: Do they furrow their brow, or widen their eyes? We can respond when they break in and interrupt us. And unless you’re addressing a stranger you know the hearer’s background: whether they’re an adult or child, whether they’re an expert in your field or not. When you’re writing you have none of those advantages. You’re casting your bread onto the waters, hoping that this invisible and unknowable audience will catch your drift.

The first thing to do in writing well—before worrying about split infinitives—is what kind of situation you imagine yourself to be in. What are you simulating when you write, and you’re only pretending to use language in the ordinary way? That stance is the main thing that iw distinguishes clear vigorous writing from the mush we see in academese and medicalese and bureaucratese and corporatese.”

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“Poets and novelists often have a better feel for the language than the self-appointed guardians and the pop grammarians because for them language is a medium. It’s a way of conveying ideas and moods with sounds. The most gifted writers—the Virginia Woolfs and H.G. Wellses and George Bernard Shaws and Herman Melvilles—routinely used words and constructions that the guardians insist are incorrect. And of course avant-garde writers such as Burroughs and Kerouac, and poets pushing the envelope or expanding the expressive possibilities of the language, will deliberately flout even the genuine rules that most people obey. But even non-avant garde writers, writers in the traditional canon, write in ways that would be condemned as grammatical errors by many of the purists, sticklers and mavens. “

 

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