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“The Internet Of Things Succeeds To The Extent That It Is Invisible”

April 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When we’re truly wired, when the Internet of Things is the thing, when the revolution is not televised but quantified, and it’s all seamless so seamless, will we even know to smile? From a Foreign Affairs piece by Neil Gershenfeld and JP Vasseur:

The Internet of Things is not just science fiction; it has already arrived. Some of the things currently networked together send data over the public Internet, and some communicate over secure private networks, but all share common protocols that allow them to interoperate to help solve profound problems.

Take energy inefficiency. Buildings account for three-quarters of all electricity use in the United States, and of that, about one-third is wasted. Lights stay on when there is natural light available, and air is cooled even when the weather outside is more comfortable or a room is unoccupied. Sometimes fans move air in the wrong direction or heating and cooling systems are operated simultaneously. This enormous amount of waste persists because the behavior of thermostats and light bulbs are set when buildings are constructed; the wiring is fixed and the controllers are inaccessible. Only when the infrastructure itself becomes intelligent, with networked sensors and actuators, can the efficiency of a building be improved over the course of its lifetime.

Health care is another area of huge promise. The mismanagement of medication, for example, costs the health-care system billions of dollars per year. Shelves and pill bottles connected to the Internet can alert a forgetful patient when to take a pill, a pharmacist to make a refill, and a doctor when a dose is missed. Floors can call for help if a senior citizen has fallen, helping the elderly live independently. Wearable sensors could monitor one’s activity throughout the day and serve as personal coaches, improving health and saving costs.

Countless futuristic “smart houses” have yet to generate much interest in living in them. But the Internet of Things succeeds to the extent that it is invisible. A refrigerator could communicate with a grocery store to reorder food, with a bathroom scale to monitor a diet, with a power utility to lower electricity consumption during peak demand, and with its manufacturer when maintenance is needed. Switches and lights in a house could adapt to how spaces are used and to the time of day. Thermostats with access to calendars, beds, and cars could plan heating and cooling based on the location of the house’s occupants. Utilities today provide power and plumbing; these new services would provide safety, comfort, and convenience.

In cities, the Internet of Things will collect a wealth of new data. Understanding the flow of vehicles, utilities, and people is essential to maximizing the productivity of each, but traditionally, this has been measured poorly, if at all. If every street lamp, fire hydrant, bus, and crosswalk were connected to the Internet, then a city could generate real-time readouts of what’s working and what’s not. Rather than keeping this information internally, city hall could share open-source data sets with developers, as some cities are already doing.•

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“We Have Been Interested In Man-Machine Communication”

April 2, 2014 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Zooey Deschanel can only have her darling discussions about tomato soup with Siri on rainy afternoons because of pioneering work in computer voice recognition that was done decades ago. Trippy video from Stanford University, 1968.

“He Read Musty Tomes That Experts Considered Hopelessly Out Of Date”

April 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I’ve put up posts before about Immanuel Velikovsky, the Russian-born psychiatrist turned catastrophist crank who presented a radical alternative to accepted planetary history. He was friends with Albert Einstein and Freeman Dyson, and was always perturbed that they and others in the scientific community didn’t take his science fiction “Worlds in Collision” theory seriously. From “Visionary to the Fringe,” by Paula Findlen in the Nation:

Early in the project, Velikovsky’s research took an unexpected turn. Seeking to confirm the historical reality of Exodus, he read the modern translation of the Ipuwer Papyrus and began to consider the potential correlation between ancient Egyptian catastrophes and biblical plagues: What had caused them, and were they indicative of a common pattern across cultures? After consulting Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas, he explored the records of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations. Velikovsky’s quest led him from the textual and archaeological challenges of deep history to the empirical findings and theoretical underpinnings of astrophysics, geology and paleontology. There, too, he found his greatest inspiration in historical sources, namely the scientific literature of the late seventeenth through early twentieth centuries, which lay neglected and largely forgotten in the stacks of the Columbia University library. Science’s past inspired his new vision of the present.

Velikovsky later observed that he rarely met professors in the library, lamenting the narrowly defined limits of their erudition in comparison with the breadth of his own. He read musty tomes that experts considered hopelessly out of date, attempting to absorb something from every possible domain of knowledge. In defense of his methodology, Velikovsky declared himself a historian and not a scientist, while nevertheless proclaiming the revolutionary importance of his findings for science. Historical data became his tool for rethinking science, though since Velikovsky failed to meet the empirical standards of either subject or to demonstrate his competence in basic research skills to expert satisfaction, neither discipline embraced him. However, scholarly disapproval has never been a serious impediment to public acclaim (consider the case of Trofim Lysenko or Malcolm Gladwell). Indeed, it became the cornerstone of his reputation as an anti-establishment figure, a latter-day Giordano Bruno or Galileo willing to be condemned as an intellectual heretic for defying authorities in pursuit of truth.•

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Velikovsky appearing on a 1964 episode of Camera Three:

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“You’ve All Of A Sudden Hit The Jackpot With A Thing Called Star Wars”

April 2, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I find all the Star Wars films intolerable, but I will acknowledge some entertainment value in seeing Sir Alec Guinness speak about the original movie in a 1977 interview with Michael Parkinson. Neither one of them took George Lucas’ blockbuster too seriously.

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“Mathematicians Have Spent Time Calculating How Long It Would Take A Monkey To Write A Copy Of Hamlet”

April 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Monkeys hitting random keys on typewriters (or tablets) would take eons to write Hamlet but not quite as long to write something better than Hamlet. It’s logical, even if it’s almost completely useless information. From Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“Mathematicians have spent time calculating how long it would take a monkey to write a copy of Hamlet (even if they perform better than the macaques in England, the answer is a really long time — orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed). But Borges’s Total Library idea suggests an important corollary to the Infinite Monkey Theorem: a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter would mostly likely write something superior to Shakespeare long before it produced a copy of Hamlet.

The logic is simple. The odds of a monkey writing an intelligible sentence are low, but the odds of one writing a sentence from Hamlet are astronomical because there are many possible intelligible sentences but a limited number of sentences in Hamlet. In the same way, there are a limited number of works by Shakespeare, but there are an almost infinite number of plays and books that are better than Shakespeare ranging from a copy of Hamlet with one small, superior tweak to yet-to-be-written sci-fi novels to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series.”

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“Even The Things About Gmail That Ticked Off Some People Presaged The Web To Come”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was an early adopter of Gmail in 2004, back when you still couldn’t create accounts at will but had to get a code sent to your cellphone to complete the sign-up process. I still remember the disquiet I felt the first time ads seemed to be targeting me based on keywords in my messages. A decade later, I’m pretty much sick of the service, “free” though it is. It’s such clutter now, with so many of my emails filtered into the wrong folders and numerous “great offers” sent to me that I don’t want. I need to switch to an email that’s stripped down and simplified.

From Harry McCracken’s new Time article, “How Gmail Happened“:

“The first true landmark service to emerge from Google since its search engine debuted in 1998, Gmail didn’t just blow away Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the dominant free webmail services of the day. With its vast storage, zippy interface, instant search and other advanced features, it may have been the first major cloud-based app that was capable of replacing conventional PC software, not just complementing it.

Even the things about Gmail that ticked off some people presaged the web to come: Its scanning of messages to find keywords that could be used for advertising purposes kicked off a conversation about online privacy that continues on to this day.

Within Google, Gmail was also regarded as a huge, improbable deal. It was in the works for nearly three years before it reached consumers; during that time, skeptical Googlers ripped into the concept on multiple grounds, from the technical to the philosophical. It’s not hard to envision an alternate universe in which the effort fell apart along the way, or at least resulted in something a whole lot less interesting.

‘It was a pretty big moment for the Internet,’ says Georges Harik, who was responsible for most of Google’s new products when Gmail was hatched. (The company called such efforts ‘Googlettes’ at the time.) ‘Taking something that hadn’t been worked on for years but was central, and fixing it.'”

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“Here An Avalanche Of News Is Shaped”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Alistair Cooke brought his Omnibus TV show into the New York Times newsroom in 1954 to see how men–and only men–published news in that era. Listen to those clunky typewriter keys tapping. The paper began to computerize two decades.later.

“The Strongest Case For Giving Alcohol To People With Chronic Alcohol Dependence Is Based On The Principle Of ‘Harm Reduction'”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Providing alcoholics with alcohol is counterintuitive to say the least, though some programs do just that. They aim to keep addicts from engaging in dangerous behavior to get their fix, but they also ensure that pretty much no one will ever completely kick the habit. From Anke Snoek at Practical Ethics:

“A Dutch program pays chronic alcoholics in beer for cleaning the streets and parks. A Canadian homeless shelter provides their alcohol clients with six ounces of white wine every 90 minutes. Giving alcohol to alcoholics, it seems counterproductive from a ‘just say no’ perspective, but I would like to argue that it makes sense on many levels.

The strongest case for giving alcohol to people with chronic alcohol dependence is based on the principle of ‘harm reduction.’ Canadian ‘wet-shelter’ programs have emerged for two main reasons. The first is that many homeless shelters are abstinence based which means inveterate drinks would continue to sleep rough, even in freezing winter months, resulting in tragic deaths. The second reason is that chronic inebriates often consume non-beverage alcohol like hand sanitizer, mouth wash and aftershave thereby exacerbating already severe health problems. A recent study by the Centre for Addictions Research found that a “managed alcohol program” approach reduced emergency hospital visits and arrests among participants at the Kwae Kii Win Centre Managed Alcohol Centre by 40-80%.”

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“It Now Has A Unit Devoted To Studying The Intersection Of Biology And Engineering”

April 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Freeman Dyson has been writing for years about an indefinite point in the future when biotech enthusiasts will be, à la their Homebrew Computer Club ancestors, tinkering in their garages, not creating new gadgets but new life forms. DARPA is, unsurprisingly, beating the hobbyists to the punch, as it did with computers and the Internet. From Meghan Neal at Vice:

“Ye sci-fi writers hard up for new material should spend an hour or so perusing the Defense Department’s 2015 budget proposal, especially the section covering the far-out research projects underway at DARPA, where the agency’s mad scientists are working to develop brain-controlled drones, biowarfare, engineer new life forms, and possibly attempt immortality.

If last year was the year of battlefield robots, cyborg soldiers, and weaponized drones, it looks like the next couple years will see the Pentagon gearing up for a deep dive into biotech. DARPA announced today it now has a unit devoted to studying the intersection of biology and engineering, the Biological Technologies Office.

The agency is betting that the next generation of defense tech will be take a cue from natural life, and as such one of the major focuses of the new unit will be on synthetic biology. It’ll ramp up research into manufacturing biomaterials, turning living cells, proteins, and DNA into a sort of genetic factory.

The goal is to create man-made, living supermaterials, prorammed through DNA code, that can be used for next-gen mechanical and electrical products, self-repairing materials, renewable fuels, solar cells, and so on.”

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“When You Invent The Ship, You Also Invent The Shipwreck”

March 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Automated Ethics,” Tom Chatfield’s excellent new Aeon essay about humans outsourcing moral quandaries to machines, which create some new challenges while eliminating many old ones:

“For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological development is inextricable from the idea of the accident. As he put it, each accident is ‘an inverted miracle… When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.’ Accidents mark the spots where anticipation met reality and came off worse. Yet each is also a spark of secular revelation: an opportunity to exceed the past, to make tomorrow’s worst better than today’s, and on occasion to promise ‘never again.’

This, at least, is the plan. ‘Never again’ is a tricky promise to keep: in the long term, it’s not a question of if things go wrong, but when. The ethical concerns of innovation thus tend to focus on harm’s minimisation and mitigation, not the absence of harm altogether. A double-hulled steamship poses less risk per passenger mile than a medieval trading vessel; a well-run factory is safer than a sweatshop. Plane crashes might cause many fatalities, but refinements such as a checklist, computer and co-pilot insure against all but the wildest of unforeseen circumstances.

Similar refinements are the subject of one of the liveliest debates in practical ethics today: the case for self-driving cars. Modern motor vehicles are safer and more reliable than they have ever been – yet more than 1 million people are killed in car accidents around the world each year, and more than 50 million are injured. Why? Largely because one perilous element in the mechanics of driving remains unperfected by progress: the human being.

Enter the cutting edge of machine mitigation. Back in August 2012, Google announced that it had achieved 300,000 accident-free miles testing its self-driving cars. The technology remains some distance from the marketplace, but the statistical case for automated vehicles is compelling. Even when they’re not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.

What, though, about more local contexts? If your vehicle encounters a busload of schoolchildren skidding across the road, do you want to live in a world where it automatically swerves, at a speed you could never have managed, saving them but putting your life at risk?”

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Old Print Articles: Joseph Faber’s 1840s Talking Machine (1870-87)

March 31, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nearly 170 years before Siri, German inventor Joseph Faber demonstrated his Talking Machine, most commonly known as “Euphonia,” which was able to speak sentences in a human if monotone voice. The marvel became a staple of Barnum’s shows, but Faber died without much to his name in the 1860s and his wife–and his contraption–fared just as poorly. Two brief articles follow about the inventor and his machine from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Talking Machines” (October 15, 1870): ”Some readers may remember Professor Faber’s automaton speaking figure, called THE EUPHONIA, when exhibited in London. It was a draped bust with a wax face. Concealed from the visitors were sixteen keys or levers, a small pair of bellows, and numerous little bits of metal, wood, and India-rubber. When any word or sentence was spoken out, either by Faber or by one of the audience, the exhibitor mentally divided all the syllables into as many distinct sounds as they embodied; he pressed upon a particular key for each particular sound, which admitted a blast of air to a particular compartment, in which the mechanism was of the kind to produce the sound required; there were thus as many pressures as there were elementary sounds. By a modification of the movements, whispering could be produced instead of speaking.”

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faber1“The Talking Machine Was There” (July 24, 1887): “Mrs. Mary Faber, the wife of Professor Faber, who had traveled around the country for years with his talking machine, took Paris green yesterday at 207 East Twenty-Fifth Street, New York. When the police were about to take her from the room Mrs. Faber recovered consciousness for a moment and, pointing to a satchel, declared that the talking machine was there. She wanted it sold to pay the rent. She will probably die.”

“Technological Dislocation May Create Great Problems”

March 31, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Automation will create wealth and foster new industries yet unthought of, but how will that wealth spread and will enough new jobs be created to replace the disappeared ones? My answers are 1) I don’t know and 2) not likely. From “A Mighty Contest” in the Economist:

“Robot-makers see their wares as a way of creating employment, both by allowing companies to make existing products more efficiently and by enabling them to manufacture new things that could not be made in any other way, such as ever more precisely engineered electronics and cars, not to mention films like Gravity. Others fear that their net effect will be to destroy a lot of jobs, and indeed that they may already be doing so. Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford, has seen a big change of heart about such technological unemployment in his discipline recently. The received wisdom used to be that although new technologies put some workers out of jobs, the extra wealth they generated increased consumption and thus created jobs elsewhere. Now many economists are taking the short- to medium-term risk to jobs far more seriously, and some think the potential scale of change may be huge. Mr. Thrun draws a parallel with employment in agriculture, which accounted for almost all jobs in the pre-modern era but has since shrunk to just 2% of the workforce. The advent of robots will have a similar effect, he predicts, but over a much shorter period. Even so, he is sure that human ingenuity will generate new jobs, just as it created vast new industries to counteract the decline in agricultural employment.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both at MIT, also have high hopes for the long-term effect of robots and similar technologies. But in a recent book, The Second Machine Age, they argue that technological dislocation may create great problems for moderately skilled workers in the coming decades. They reckon that innovation has speeded up a lot in the past few years and will continue at this pace, for three reasons: the exponential growth in computing power; the progressive digitisation of things that people work with, from maps to legal texts to spreadsheets; and the opportunities for innovators to combine an ever-growing stock of things, ideas and processes into ever more new products and services.

Between them, these trends might continue to ‘hollow out’ labour markets in developed countries and, soon enough, developing ones, as more and more jobs requiring medium levels of skill are automated away.”

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“Bags Containing Mountain Air Were Shipped Into One Particularly Smog-Addled City”

March 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Over the past few years, you’d sometimes hear free-market extremists laud China’s lack of regulatory policy allowing for unfettered expansion of the nation’s economy. But there are, of course, no free lunches–and no free air, in this case. According to a post at the WSJ blog by Te-Ping Chen, environmental damage in China has entered the sci-fi stage. The opening:

“Proving that China’s fight against pollution has moved decisively into the realm of parody, bags containing mountain air were shipped into one particularly smog-addled city over the weekend.

No, it wasn’t a scene from Spaceballs. According to the organizer, a Henan-based travel company, 20 bright blue bags of air were shipped to Zhengzhou, capital of central China’s Henan province, as a special treat for residents. The air originated from Laojun Mountain, some 120 miles away from the city, and was brought as part of a promotional gimmick to show oxygen-deprived city residents what they’re missing.

In its account of the event, the state-run China News Service said that some of the residents who lined up for the chance to inhale—they were limited to a few minutes each—tried to wring the bags in order to extract every bit of air possible.

‘I felt my baby move right when I breathed in,’ one pregnant woman who participated in the event told the agency. ‘I would love to walk in the mountain’s forests after my child is born,’ Sun added.”

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“Fully Autonomous Cars May Be ‘A Bridge Too Far’ For The Near Future”

March 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An Independent article by Jack Pitts covers Elon Musk’s recent pronouncements about the near-term design of driverless cars, which are both bold and somewhat sobering, though I bet only the bold part gets a lot of press. An excerpt:

“Speaking to the Financial Times Musk confirmed his company’s aspiration to build the first commercial self-drive vehicles – aiming to implement them within the Model S, Tesla’s landmark electric car.

Previously Musk has tweeted: ‘Intense effort underway at Tesla to develop a practical autopilot system for Model S’ and ‘Engineers interested in working on autonomous driving, pls email autopilot@teslamotors.com. Team will report directly to me.’

During the interview Musk referred to Tesla’s self-drive technology as ‘an autopilot’ that could be switched on an off like an aeroplane’s guidance systems. A fully-autonomous car that is entirely under computer control, he says, would be too dangerous with current technology.

Weary drivers were recently tantalised by photos of commuters in futuristic cars watching TV, chatting and looking anywhere but the road.

However, Musk himself admits that this may be a fantasy: ‘We should be able to do 90 per cent of miles driven within three years,’ adding that fully autonomous cars may be ‘a bridge too far’ for the near future.”

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“Limiting Facial Animation May Make People Less Appealing”

March 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m terrible at recognizing faces but really good at reading them, at interpreting the microexpressions that reveal inner feelings. Dr. Paul Ekman, the inspiration for the TV show Lie to Me, pioneered the study of facial expressions during his psychological career. From a 2003 New York Times interview with him conducted by Judy Foreman:

Question:

More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that human facial expressions are universal. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead thought the opposite. What do you think?

Dr. Paul Ekman:

Initially, back in 1965, I thought Margaret Mead was probably right. But I decided to get the evidence to settle the argument. I showed pictures of facial expressions to people in the U.S., Japan, Argentina, Chile and Brazil and found that they judged the expressions in the same way.

But this was not conclusive because all these people could have learned the meaning of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. I needed visually isolated people unexposed to the modern world and the media.

I found them in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the West.

Question:

One of your most fascinating findings is that if a person merely arranges his face into a certain expression, he will actually feel the corresponding emotion. In other words, emotions work from the outside in as well as the inside out. Is happiness really as simple as putting on a happy face?

Dr. Paul Ekman:

In a very limited way, yes. The trick with happiness is that while everybody can smile, most people can’t move one crucial muscle around the eyes that must be moved to generate the physiology of happiness. With anger or disgust, though, everybody can make the right facial movements and turn on the physical sensations of those emotions.

Question:

If I received Botox injections all over my face and could not make normal expressions, would my emotions be similarly curtailed?

Dr. Paul Ekman:

Probably not. I did a study with Robert Levenson, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, on people who had been born with facial paralysis. We found no impairment in their ability to recognize or experience emotions. There is a problem with Botox, though. Limiting facial animation may make people less appealing.•

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“I Haven’t Thought A Lot About Immigration As A Way Of Dealing With World Poverty”

March 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Very happy to see that the bizarre attack on economist Tyler Cowen at George Mason didn’t result in any serious injury. Strange world.

I think any nation as mobile and armed as this one (though thankfully there was no gun involved in this case) desperately needs universal healthcare with a strong mental-wellness component. Are there fewer incidences of gun violence in a country which has abundant firearms and universal coverage (e.g., Canada) than in the U.S., which is only now belatedly trying to guarantee care for all its citizens, because insured people can see a doctor when they need to? There are probably lots of cultural reasons for the disparity, but it seems like focus in this area could be beneficial.

From a really interesting 2009 interview Cowen conducted with philosopher Peter Singer, a dialogue about using immigration as a poverty-fighting tool:

“Tyler Cowen:

For instance, in my view, what is by far the best anti-poverty program, the only one that’s really been shown to work, and that’s what’s called ‘immigration.’ I don’t even see the word ‘immigration’ in your book’s index. So why don’t we spend a lot more resources allowing immigration, supporting immigration, lobbying for immigration? This raises people’s incomes very dramatically, it’s sustainable, for the most part it’s also good for us. Why not make that the centerpiece of an anti-poverty platform?

Peter Singer:

That’s an interesting point, Tyler. I suppose, one question I’d like to ask is: is it sustainable? Isn’t it the case that if we take, as immigrants, the people who are the most enterprising, perhaps, of the poor countries that we’re still going to leave those countries in poverty, and their populations may continue to rise, and eventually, even if we keep taking immigrants, we will reach a capacity where we’re starting to strain our own country?

Tyler Cowen:

There’s two separate issues: one is ‘brain drain’ from the third world. I think here’s a lot of research by [Michael Clemens], showing that it’s not a problem, that third world countries that have even somewhat functional institutions tend to benefit by sending people to other countries. India’s a good example: a lot of Indians return to India and start businesses, or they send money back home. Mexico is another example. Maybe North Korea is somewhat different, but for the most part immigration seems to benefit both countries.

I don’t think we could have open borders; I don’t think we could have unlimited immigration, but we’re both sitting here in the United States and it hardly seems to me that we’re at the breaking point. Immigrants would benefit much more: their wages would rise by a factor of twenty or more, and there would be perhaps some costs to us, but in a cost-benefit sense it seems far, far more effective than sending them money. Do you agree?

Peter Singer:

I must admit that I haven’t thought a lot about immigration as a way of dealing with world poverty. Obviously, from what you’re saying, I should be thinking more about it, but I can’t really say whether I agree until I have thought more about it.”

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“I Don’t Want To Die, Especially Just Because I Don’t Have Enough Money To Go In The Hospital”

March 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because many are more driven by ideology than pragmatism, legislation like the Affordable Care Act isn’t only measured by accomplishment but also by party affiliation. Close to seven million previously uninsured Americans will have health insurance at this year’s deadline (and that’s not counting those added to Medicaid). Sick people who were denied insurance or had their policies cancelled when they became ill are now protected. The number of uninsured has dropped sharply and spiralling healthcare costs have slowed for the first time in memory. In future years, as we get closer to the goal of 30 million newly insured, that number will likely be attended by a lot of job creation. Universal coverage may be the low-hanging fruit that can boost employment. But the GOP will run against Obamacare in the 2014 and 2016 elections, and it will resonate with some.

An excerpt from Terry Gross’ 2009 interview with the late singer-songwriter Vic Chestnutt, whose was left largely paralyzed in a car accident while a teenager, and lived in debt his whole adult life because he wasn’t able to get health insurance:

“Terry Gross:

So, what are your thoughts now as you watch the health care legislation controversy play out?

Vic Chestnutt:

Wow. I have been amazed and confused by the health care debate. We need health care reform. There is no doubt about it, we really need health care reform in this country. Because it’s absurd that somebody like me has to pay so much, it’s just too expensive in this country. It’s just ridiculously expensive. That they can take my house away for a kidney stone operation is -that’s absurd.

Terry Gross:

Is that what you’re facing the possibility of now?

Vic Chestnutt:

Yeah. I mean, it could – I’m not sure exactly. I mean, I don’t have cash money to pay these people. I tried to pay them. I tried to make payments and then they finally ended up saying, no, you have to pay us in full now. And so, you know, I’m not sure what exactly my options are. I just – I really – you know, my feeling is that I think they’ve been paid, they’ve already been paid $100,000 from my insurance company. That seems like plenty. I mean, this would pay for like five or six of these operations in any other country in the world. You know, it affects – I mean, right now I need another surgery and I’ve been putting it off for a year because I can’t afford it. And that’s absurd, I think.

I mean, I could actually lose a kidney. And, I mean, I could die only because I cannot afford to go in there again. I don’t want to die, especially just because of I don’t have enough money to go in the hospital. But that’s the reality of it. You know, I have a preexisting condition, my quadriplegia, and I can’t get health insurance.

Terry Gross:

Is it true you can’t get good health insurance?

Vic Chestnutt:

I can’t get – I’m uninsurable.•

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“Why Egypt? Why Did This Become The Cradle Of Civilization?”

March 30, 2014 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A clip from Walter Cronkite’s sit-down with Anwar Sadat in the shadows of the pyramids, in 1977, four years before the Egyptian president was assassinated, in which Sadat denies slave labor was used to build the incredible tombs.

In 2006, Cronkite called it the most important interview he ever did, largely because Sadat, though mostly an uninteresting speaker, announced out of the blue that he would go to Israel, an offer the anchor initially misunderstood. Cronkite ultimately helped broker the trip.

“A World Without Irrationality Would Have No Help, Altruism, Caring, Love”

March 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who focuses a great deal of his work on irrationality and lying, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What has been your favorite social experiment to try on a college campus and which experiment has changed your opinion on a certain topic the most?

Dan Ariely:

Probably the vaccination experiment — they took a group of students and gave half of them information about the importance of vaccination, but also gave the other half directions to the health center and asked them to indicate a time in their calendars that they would show up. Amazingly, the information did very little but the map and schedule was very effective at getting people to show up and get vaccinated. For me, this is an important building block — providing people with information is not very useful, and we need to change the environment to facilitate better decision-making.

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Question:

Do you believe people are selfish rather than altruistic? (not sure how to ask this as not to suggest an answer). Is it meaningful to ask this question and to what extent do you believe this has to do with the threat of punishment rather than trying to act in accordance with moral principle?

Dan Ariely:

I believe that people are deeply altruistic, and selfishness comes later. One piece of evidence for this is that we have some data showing that when people are drunk, they react more extremely to injustice — even at a cost to themselves.

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Question:

Not to name any public personalities on the spot, but there is a slew of self-help books/speakers/retreats – in other words, a multi-billion dollar industry out there that operates on making people believe that they can profoundly change themselves. In my own case, personal shortcomings like procrastination for example, how likely is it that someone in her 50s can still successfully tackle these types of personal problems? In other words, is the self-help industry a hoax? Is is irrational to expect change on a deep level?

Dan Ariely:

There is clearly a demand for self-help, and it is a very interesting industry. To look into this, I went to a 3-day event with Tony Robbins and one with the Landmark Forum. In each, there was some grain of scientific evidence but they were building giant castles from these grains of sand. I also saw lots of pain in these meetings, and people who were dealing with very complex problems. And it upsets me that these organizations are selling them the “answers” at such a high cost.

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Question:

What would happen if the whole world behaved rationally? What would have existed that we don’t have today?

Dan Ariely:

I would hate to live in this world. A world without irrationality would have no help, altruism, caring, love. Count me out.

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Question:

What is the most common irrational human act that you come across?

Dan Ariely:

Having kids.•

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“Consultants Urge The Data-Naive To Wise Up To The Potential Of Big Data”

March 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Data, no matter how big or small, is only as good as those people–or algorithms–deciphering it. Even when Big Data can give us an answer to a problem, it doesn’t necessarily give us the root of the problem. When it’s read well, it’s a good complement to other methods of research; when read poorly, it can be used to create faulty policy: From Tim Harford’s latest Financial Times piece:

“Cheerleaders for big data have made four exciting claims, each one reflected in the success of Google Flu Trends: that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote ‘The End of Theory,’ a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, ‘with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.’

Unfortunately, these four articles of faith are at best optimistic oversimplifications. At worst, according to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge university, they can be ‘complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.’

Found data underpin the new internet economy as companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon seek new ways to understand our lives through our data exhaust. Since Edward Snowden’s leaks about the scale and scope of US electronic surveillance it has become apparent that security services are just as fascinated with what they might learn from our data exhaust, too.

Consultants urge the data-naive to wise up to the potential of big data. A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute reckoned that the US healthcare system could save $300bn a year – $1,000 per American – through better integration and analysis of the data produced by everything from clinical trials to health insurance transactions to smart running shoes.

But while big data promise much to scientists, entrepreneurs and governments, they are doomed to disappoint us if we ignore some very familiar statistical lessons.”

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“I Wanted To Take It Seriously…The Possibility That You Were Actually Now Going To Sit In Space”

March 28, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Long before Louis C.K. thought it was amazing that people could complain about airplanes while they’re “sitting in a chair in the sky,” Brian Eno focused on the same in his 1978 sound installation, Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

“The Means By Which This ‘Internet Of Things’ Uses Power And Sends Data Around Has Been Somewhat Haphazard”

March 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Internet of Things makes too much sense to not happen, but there have to be some sort of universal operating standards before machines can communicate coherently with each other and us, before our health and homes can be quantified and the connectivity of computers can be duplicated in all objects. It will result in challenges (e.g., everything will be a target of hackers) but also real benefits. From a post by Quentin Hardy at the New York Times’ “Bits” blog:

“Attention: Internet of Things. For better or worse, big boys are in the room.

A consortium of industrial giants, including AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel said on Thursday that they would cooperate to create engineering standards to connect objects, sensors and large computing systems in some of the world’s largest industrial assets, like oil refineries, factories or harbors. The White House and other United States governmental entities were also involved in the creation of the group, which is expected to enroll other large American and foreign businesses.

‘I don’t think anything this big has been tried before’ in terms of sweeping industrial cooperation, said William Ruh, vice president of G.E.’s global software center. ‘This is how we will make machines, people and data work together.’

There are connections among all sorts of industrial assets, like sensors on turbines or soda machines that tell suppliers when they are running low on cola.

The means by which this ‘Internet of Things’ uses power and sends data around has been somewhat haphazard.

The group, called the Industrial Internet Consortium, hopes to establish common ways that machines share information and move data.”

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“It Is Important To Note That There Have Been No Fire Injuries (Or Serious, Permanent Injuries Of Any Kind) In A Tesla At All”

March 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As mentioned in the post about Steven Pinker and the Availability Heuristic, we aren’t always great at gauging what’s truly bad for us. When a new technology experiences glitches that older ones also endure, sometimes too bright a light is shined on just the avant garde. The opening of Elon Musk’s Medium essay about Tesla introducing further fireproofing protections:

“In 2013, two extremely unusual Model S collisions resulted in underbody damage that led to car fires. These incidents, unfortunately, received more national headlines than the other 200,000 gasoline car fires that happened last year in North America alone. In both cases, the occupants walked away unharmed, thanks to the car’s safety features. The onboard computer warned the occupants to exit the vehicles, which they did well before any fire was noticeable. However, even if the occupants had remained in the vehicle and the fire department had not arrived, they would still have been safely protected by the steel and ceramic firewall between the battery pack and the passenger compartment.

It is important to note that there have been no fire injuries (or serious, permanent injuries of any kind) in a Tesla at all. The odds of fire in a Model S, at roughly 1 in 8,000 vehicles, are five times lower than those of an average gasoline car and, when a fire does occur, the actual combustion potential is comparatively small. However, to improve things further, we provided an over-the-air software update a few months ago to increase the default ground clearance of the Model S at highway speeds, substantially reducing the odds of a severe underbody impact.

Nonetheless, we felt it was important to bring this risk down to virtually zero to give Model S owners complete peace of mind. Starting with vehicle bodies manufactured as of March 6, all cars have been outfitted with a triple underbody shield. Tesla service will also retrofit the shields, free of charge, to existing cars upon request or as part of a normally scheduled service.”

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“The Technique Involves Replacing All Of A Patient’s Blood With A Cold Saline Solution”

March 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Historically, people have been accidentally buried alive because defining death isn’t as easy as it might seem. Those lines will be further blurred with new medical procedures. From Helen Thomson at New Scientist:

“NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.

Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.

‘We are suspending life, but we don’t like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction,’ says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. ‘So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.’

The technique involves replacing all of a patient’s blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. ‘If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can’t bring them back to life. But if they’re dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,’ says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.”

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“Even The Worst Terrorist Attacks Kill A Trifling Number Of People Compared To War, Genocide, And Homicide”

March 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Death is death, but many of us have way more fear of a horrible demise that’s unlikely than a comparatively “benign” one which has a greater probability of occurring, even if the physical pain involved is equal. It’s an utter lack of control that seems to haunt us most.

U.S. commercial airlines almost never crash, but MH-370 floating mysteriously into oblivion has awakened fears of death by air when we know logically that a fatal car accident is much more likely. These same anxieties will likely play a role in determining how quickly we adopt driverless autos, which will save so many lives but will ultimately fail on occasion and kill someone who had no authority over the incident. That will seem scarier to some.

These fears don’t only govern our own decisions but can influence the creation of policy as well–policy that can end up costing more lives than it saves. An excerpt from Steven Pinker’s comments which appear in an Edge feature about Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman:

“As many Edge readers know, my recent work has involved presenting copious data indicating that rates of violence have fallen over the years, decades, and centuries, including the number of annual deaths in war, terrorism, and homicide. Most people find this claim incredible on the face of it. Why the discrepancy between data and belief? The answer comes right out of Danny’s work with Amos Tversky on the Availability Heuristic. People estimate the probability of an event by the ease of recovering vivid examples from memory. As I explained, ‘Scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.’

The availability heuristic also explains a paradox in people’s perception of the risks of terrorism. The world was turned upside-down in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. But putting aside the entirely hypothetical scenario of nuclear terrorism, even the worst terrorist attacks kill a trifling number of people compared to other causes of violent death such as war, genocide, and homicide, to say nothing of other risks of death. Terrorists know this, and draw disproportionate attention to their grievances by killing a relatively small number of innocent people in the most attention-getting ways they can think of.

Even the perceived probability of nuclear terrorism is almost certainly exaggerated by the imaginability of the scenario (predicted at various times to be near-certain by 1990, 2000, 2005, and 2010, and notoriously justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq). I did an Internet survey which showed that people judge it more probable that ‘a nuclear bomb would be set off in the United States or Israel by a terrorist group that obtained it from Iran’ than that ‘a nuclear bomb would be set off'” It’s an excellent example of Kahneman and Tversky’s Conjunction Fallacy…”

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