Science/Tech

You are currently browsing the archive for the Science/Tech category.

Jules Reveillier, By Land Or By Sea (1907)

October 2, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

That the early 20th-century demonstrations of the Waterland were a great success didn’t really matter; there wasn’t a market for an amphibious automobile. But that doesn’t diminish the wow factor of inventor Jules Reveillier’s insane boat-on-wheels, pictured here in a classic photograph. From a November 13, 1907 New York Times report about an outlandish test run in (and around) the Hudson:

“The amphibious French automobile took its first plunge in America yesterday afternoon at Fort Washington on the Hudson, while fifty or more automobile and motorboat experts watched its performance. After a half hour spent in diving from the beach to the river and returning, cavorting about in the quiet waters of the Hudson, and similar stunts, the car ran up the bank and across the New York Central Railroad tracks, climbed the steep hill to Riverside Drive, and rolled merrily down the Drive amid the plaudits of those who watched it. The opinion of the experts who saw it was that the demonstration was a complete success, though in its present form its commercial value is not apparent.

The demonstration was arranged by a firm of automobile dealers, and on its success was supposed to depend whether or not the firm would put the invention on the market. The invention is owned by Jules Reveillier, a French automobile enthusiast, who recently brought the boat across the Atlantic to show Americans its possibilities.

The contrivance is unusual enough in appearance to arouse interest anywhere. Its body is shaped exactly like the ordinary motorboat, except that it is a little broad of bean for high speed. It has the regulation straight prow, sharp nosed and broadening quickly to its greatest beam. The engine is set well forward in the usual covered compartment, and a cockpit, equipped with typical automobile steering wheel, is directly amidships. A seat wide enough to comfortably accommodate two persons is set behind the wheel, and is supposed to be occupied by the steersman and the engineer. Behind this seat, and almost flush with the deck, is another, wide enough for two men. The body is rounded off abruptly at the stern.

The front wheels, which respond to the steering wheel, are set forward of the engine two or three feet. The wheels are directed by a steering gear like that attached to the rudder of an ordinary boat operated by chains running from the bow, while the rear wheels are turned by chain gear.

The wheels are made of hollow steel plates and have ordinary automobile tires. They are thus available for road service, and act as air chambers to help keep the machine afloat when in the water and as a keel to prevent it from turning over. A simple mechanical contrivance shifts the power from the driving wheels to the propeller as the boat enters the water, and shifts it back again when it reaches land.

The present boat is built entirely of steel. It is equipped with a low power automobile engine. On land the engine is capable of driving the car twenty miles an hour, while in the water it attains a speed of about nine knots under ordinary conditions.

The machine is 8 or 9 feet long, with a wheel base of 54 inches.

The possibility of navigating on land was acknowledged by the party that went up the Hudson to see to see the boat tried, and it was taken at once to the waterfront yesterday. It traveled over the rough ground on the bank of the river without difficulty, and entered the water easily. As the forward wheels entered the water they floated the prow, when the hub was submerged, and the rear wheels drove the boat on while they were on land.

The driver who handled the car transferred the power to the propeller skillfully, and the momentum acquired in leaving the bank carried the contrivance well out into the stream. It answered perfectly to the rudder.

Returning, the machine mounted the bank easily. Several time these dives were repeated, and the boat each time entered and left the water successfully.”

Tags:

“The Eggers Novel I’d Love To Read Is The One Dominated By The Best Of Intentions”

October 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I posted an excerpt from the new Dave Eggers novel earlier, and here’s part of a riposte to the book that Felix Salmon wrote for Reuters, which contends that the author gets Silicon Valley all wrong. Because the novel doesn’t come out for another week and I haven’t read it, I don’t know what to say about this critique. Eggers seems to have purposely written about the Valley without firsthand experience in the same way that Kafka imagined America or Stephen Crane the Civil War, hoping to create something of an impressionistic truth. At any rate, this is from Salmon:

“The thing about the Valley that Eggers misses is that it’s populated by people who consider themselves above the rest of the country — intellectually, culturally, financially. They consider themselves the cognitive elite; the rest of us are the puppets dancing on the end of their strings of code.

Besides, we all share the downside of being part of an always-on, networked society, whether we participate on social media or not. If you’re going to suffer the downside, you might as well enjoy the upside — that’s all the motivation that anybody needs to get involved, there’s no need for crude coercion.

In science, there’s a phenomenon called ‘herd immunity’: if you vaccinate a high enough proportion of people, the entire population becomes immune. The evolution of the web is similar: enough of us are connected, in many different ways, that no one has real privacy any longer. Eggers can see that, but he then tries to reverse-engineer how we got here, and, by dint of not doing his homework, gets it very wrong.

The Circle is a malign organization; you can almost see its CEO, Eamon Bailey, stroking a white cat in his suburban Palo Alto lair, dreaming of Global Domination. In reality, however, the open protocols of the World Wide Web led naturally and ineluctably to our current loss of privacy. Tim Berners-Lee is no evil genius; he’s a good guy. And the Eggers novel I’d love to read is the one dominated by the best of intentions. Rather than the one which thinks that if technology is causing problems, then the cause must always be technologists with maleficent ulterior motives.”•

_________________________

Eggers visits Conan in 2004:

Tags: ,

“There Are No Death Panels In The Law”

October 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

People with health insurance don’t face death panels–people without it do. Cutting through the nonsense surrounding the arrival of Obamacare is Carter Price, an analyst at the think-tank RAND Corporation, who’s spent much recent time studying the Affordable Care Act. He did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit on the day Obamacare goes into effect.

___________________________ 

Question:

Which talking point against the Affordable Care Act is the least truthful/meritorious? And which has the most merit?

 

Carter Price: 

There are no death panels in the law.

You won’t necessarily be able to keep your exact insurance. 

___________________________

Question:

So, can I keep my health insurance? 

Carter Price:

It depends on how you get your insurance. If you get it from your employer, the law won’t change that (though your employer might). If you get it on the individual market, you will have access to new types of plans and your existing plan might not be allowed (for example, if you have a very high deductible plan)

Question:

Is it fair to say, then, that Obama’s initial promise when selling the bill (“If you like your insurance, you can keep it”) was, although spoken with honest intentions, a bit misleading? 

Carter Price: 

Those statements certainly did not capture all of the nuances of the law, but for most people with insurance, there won’t be an impact.

______________________________

Question:

So in your professional opinion will the ACA have a net positive or net negative effect on employment?

Carter Price:

It will vary substantially state to state.

Researchers at the Urban Institute found that it would reduce “job-lock” where people are locked into jobs because of the insurance only.

_____________________________

Question:

How much savings if any would the US receive if an NHS model or even a Canadian-single payer model was implemented? Would drug price negotiation, non-employment-based insurance or something else help?

Why is the US so embattled over domestic issues while so apparently lax on military spending? A single aircraft carrier is $9B-$14B (why so expensive?) and in comparison, medicaid cuts in many populous states amount less than that.

Carter Price:

The US is on a path to spending 20% of our GDP on health care. Most other developed countries spend less than 10%. So in is certainly possible that a different model could result in much lower costs. I haven’t done the same level of analysis on applying these alternate systems to the U.S. and can’t really answer that in detail.•

Tags:

“My God, Mae Thought. It’s Heaven.”

October 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dave Eggers’ latest novel, The Circle, is a satire about, among other things, social networking, that really good and really bad idea. Here’s the opening of an excerpt from it running in the New York Times Magazine this week:

“My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven.

The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands. On land that had once been a shipyard, then a drive-in movie theater, then a flea market, then blight, there were now soft green hills and a Calatrava fountain. And a picnic area, with tables arranged in concentric circles. And tennis courts, clay and grass. And a volleyball court, where tiny children from the company’s day care center were running, squealing, weaving like water. Amid all this was a workplace, too, 400 acres of brushed steel and glass on the headquarters of the most influential company in the world. The sky above was spotless and blue.

Mae was making her way through all of this, walking from the parking lot to the main hall, trying to look as if she belonged. The walkway wound around lemon and orange trees, and its quiet red cobblestones were replaced, occasionally, by tiles with imploring messages of inspiration. ‘Dream,’ one said, the word laser-cut into the stone. ‘Participate,’ said another. There were dozens: ‘Find Community.’ ‘Innovate.’ ‘Imagine.’ She just missed stepping on the hand of a young man in a gray jumpsuit; he was installing a new stone that said, ‘Breathe.’

On a sunny Monday in June, Mae stopped in front of the main door, standing below the logo etched into the glass above. Though the company was less than six years old, its name and logo — a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center — were already among the best known in the world. There were more than 10,000 employees on this, the main campus, but the Circle had offices all over the globe and was hiring hundreds of gifted young minds every week. It had been voted the world’s most admired company four years running.

Mae wouldn’t have thought she had a chance to work at such a place but for Annie. Annie was two years older, and they roomed together for three semesters in college, in an ugly building made habitable through their extraordinary bond, something like friends, something like sisters — or cousins who wished they were siblings and would have reason never to be apart. Their first month living together, Mae broke her jaw one twilight, after fainting, flu-ridden and underfed, during finals. Annie had told her to stay in bed, but Mae went to the Kwik Trip for caffeine and woke up on the sidewalk, under a tree. Annie took her to the hospital and waited as they wired her jaw and then stayed with Mae, sleeping next to her, in a wooden chair, all night, and then at home, for days, had fed Mae through a straw. It was a fierce level of commitment and competence that Mae had never seen from someone her age or near her age, and Mae was thereafter loyal in a way she’d never known she could be.

While Mae was still at Carleton, meandering between majors, from art history to marketing to psychology — getting her degree in psych with no plans to go further in the field — Annie had graduated, gotten her M.B.A. from Stanford and was recruited everywhere, but particularly at the Circle, and had landed here days after graduation. Now she had some lofty title — Director of Ensuring the Future, Annie joked — and had urged Mae to apply for a job. Mae did so, and though Annie insisted that she pulled no strings, Mae was sure Annie had, and she felt indebted beyond all measure. A million people, a billion, wanted to be where Mae was at this moment, entering this atrium, 30 feet high and shot through with California light, on her first day working for the only company that really mattered at all.” 

Tags:

“Many Things Have Started With A Dream”

October 1, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The more popular cars in the 1890s or so were electric and steam with the fossil-fuel models trailing. Alas, things change. Violinist Jascha Heifetz bucked the trend in the 1967 and commissioned a battery-powered car to be custom built for him.

Tags:

“All Whistleblowers Are Immediately Demonized”

October 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Edward Snowden didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already and I doubt he surprised you, either. With our cameras and clouds, everyone is watching everyone and I don’t think legislation will change that no matter how much idealistic people wish it would. But that doesn’t mean Snowden did a horrible thing, either, that he’s a villain just because he’s not a hero. Someone who hates surveillance winding up in Russia has played a bad joke on himself, but his intentions seem to have been noble. Rather than trying to make him Public Enemy # 1, I wish we’d take a moment to have an honest discussion about how much privacy is truly possible in the world we’ve created for ourselves.

Glenn Greenwald and Janine Gibson of the Guardian US, which broke the Snowden story,  just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Largely like-minded people showed up for it, so there’s sadly mostly congratulation and little debate. But a few exchanges follow.

____________________________

Question:

What would you say is the single most shocking revelation that Snowden has leaked and why?

Glenn Greenwald:

The general revelation that the objective of the NSA is literally the elimination of global privacy: ensuring that every form of human electronic communication – not just those of The Terrorists™ – is collected, stored, analyzed and monitored.

The NSA has so radically misled everyone for so long about its true purpose that revealing its actual institutional function was shocking to many, many people, and is the key context for understanding these other specific revelations.

____________________________

Question:

Will there be any more groundbreaking leaks? Also, how do you feel about the response from the American people?

Glenn Greenwald:

There are definitely huge new stories to come: many more. I’ve said that from the start every time I was asked and I think people see by now that it’s true. In fact, as Janine said the other day, the documents and newsworthy revelations are so massive that no one news organization can possibly process them all.

As for public opinion, I’m incredibly gratified that Americans, and people around the world, have been so engaged by these issues and that public opinion polls show radical shifts in how people perceive that threats to their privacy/civil liberties from their own government are greater than threats to their safety from The Terrorists.

____________________________

Question:

I just realized you’ve done a good job keeping your source out of the limelight, it feels like he’s slowly fading from public consciousness and the real story is gaining traction.

Glenn Greenwald:

This is an astute point, and the credit for this is due to Snowden.

One of the most darkly hilarious things to watch is how government apologists and media servants are driven by total herd behavior: they all mindlessly adopt the same script and then just keep repeating it because they see others doing so and, like parrots, just mimic what they hear.

All whistleblowers are immediately demonized – they have to be “crazy” lest people think that there is something valid to their view that they saw injustices so fundamental that it was worth risking their liberty to expose. That’s why Nixon wanted Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalysis files: degrading the psyche of whistleblowers is vital to defending the status quo.

The script used to do this to Snowden was that he was a “fame-seeking narcissist.” Hordes of people who had no idea what “narcissism” even means – and who did not know the first thing about Snowden – kept repeating this word over and over because that became the cliche used to demonize him.

The reason this was darkly hilarious is because there is almost no attack on him more patently invalid than this one. When he came to us, he said: “after I identify myself as the source and explain why I did this, I intend to disappear from media sight, because I know they will want to personalize the story about me, and I want the focus to remain on the substance of NSA disclosures.”

He has been 100% true to his word. Almost every day for four months, I’ve had the biggest TV shows and most influential media stars calling and emailing me, begging to interview Snowden for TV. He has refused every request because he does not want the attention to be on him, but rather on the disclosures that he risked his liberty and even his life to bring to the world.

He could easily have been the most famous person in the world, on TV every day and night. But he chose not to, selflessly, so that he would not distract from the substance of the story.

How the people who spent months screaming “fame whore” and “narcissist” at him don’t fall on the ground in shame is mystifying to me. Few smear campaigns have ever proven more baseless than this one.

____________________________

Question:

Why do you think the leak about forwarding data to Israel received relatively little attention compared to other leaks?

Glenn Greenwald:

1) Because it involved “Israel”, which sends some people into fear-based silence; 2) Because it happened in the middle of Syria, which took up most oxygen; 3) Because the New York Times published nothing about it, for ignominious and self-serving reasons highlighted by its own public editor; and 4) Because there is some NSA fatigue: a sense that nothing that is revealed can surprise any longer.

The Times’ excuse for those interested.

____________________________

Question:

Is Seymour Hersh right? Is the Osama death story “one big lie”?

Glenn Greenwald:

I don’t know, but I know that Seymour Hersh is responsible for some of the bravest and most important journalism of the last 40 years; has incredibly good sources; and gave one of the best interviews I’ve ever heard on the nature of the US media last week. That doesn’t mean he’s infallible, but I trust him far more than most US journalists deemed Serious and Important (i.e., D.C. courtiers of the royal court).•

Tags: , ,

“I Look For Natural Ingredients In My Food”

October 1, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Gypsy Boots wasn’t the only old school natural-food enthusiast. Case in point: Euell Gibbons, who prepared three-course meals from plants foraged from Central Park. Profiled by John McPhee in the New Yorker in 1968, here he is in a Grape Nuts commercial from the following decade.

Tags:

“You Know This Because You Live In The Future Where Surveillance Is Universal, Ubiquitous And Unavoidable”

September 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Life in the Fishbowl,” Stuart Armstong’s Aeon essay which takes an optimistic view of the surveillance state, seeing the Google Glass as half full:

“Suppose you’re walking home one night, alone, and you decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. You make it halfway through, when suddenly you hear some drunks stumbling behind you. Some of them are shouting curses. They look large and powerful, and there are several of them. Nonetheless, you feel safe, because you know someone is watching.

You know this because you live in the future where surveillance is universal, ubiquitous and unavoidable. Governments and large corporations have spread cameras, microphones and other tracking devices all across the globe, and they also have the capacity to store and process oceans of surveillance data in real time. Big Brother not only watches your sex life, he analyses it. It sounds nightmarish — but it might be inevitable. So far, attempts to control surveillance have generally failed. We could be headed straight for the panopticon, and if recent news developments are any indication, it might not take that long to get there.

Maybe we should start preparing. And not just by wringing our hands or mounting attempts to defeat surveillance. For if there’s a chance that the panopticon is inevitable, we ought to do some hard thinking about its positive aspects. Cataloguing the downsides of mass surveillance is important, essential even. But we have a whole literature devoted to that. Instead, let’s explore its potential benefits.”

Tags:

“He Invented A Machine That Can Read What You Type”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Just amazing footage of the late inventor David H. Shepard demonstrating his Optical Character Reader on a 1959 episode of I’ve Got a Secret. From his 2007 New York Times obituary: “David H. Shepard, who in his attic invented one of the first machines that could read, and then, to facilitate its interpreting of credit-card receipts, came up with the near-rectilinear font still used for the cards’ numbers, died on Nov. 24 in San Diego. He was 84. …

Mr. Shepard followed his reading machine, more formally known as an optical-character-recognition device, with one that could listen and talk. It could answer only ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but each answer led to a deeper level of complexity. A later version could simultaneously handle multiple telephone inquiries. …

In 1964, his ‘conversation machine’ became the first commercial device to give telephone callers access to computer data by means of their own voices.  …

Mr. Shepard apologized many times for his major role in forcing people to converse with a machine instead of with a human being.”

Tags:

“If It Had Been A Plague It Would Have Been A Historic Event”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The jobless recovery is a complicated thing, and not just a political one. So many jobs have become ghosts in the machine. Luddism doesn’t work, but the new normal can scare you to death. Are an automated society and a capitalist one compatible? From Katharine Rowland’s Guernica interview with George Packer about his recent book, The Unwinding:

Guernica:

There’s also a story that reads almost like a parable of the fall occurring between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What’s happened in that period with regard to the middle class? 

George Packer:

That’s part of the story. I had seen this in more political terms as sort of the end of the conservative era. The Reagan era began in 1980 and ended in 2008, that was my historical hypothesis. Now I’m remembering other false starts, like I spent months reading the literature of the neoconservatives of the 1970s to get into the mindset of the early Reagan years. But all of that fell by the wayside when I figured out I could do it through characters. It was these people who took me to the big theme of the social contract. It was in all their lives. It used to be that jobs were going to be there when you left high school in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Screw-up students went to textile factories, and better students went to the RJ Reynolds Warehouse, believe it or not, and the really good students went to community college. And that doesn’t happen anymore, those jobs aren’t there. The screw-up students are doing meth and hanging out at the pool hall and the bowling alley.

I didn’t look for it, it was there everywhere—the sense that not necessarily a wonderful life, but a decent life had been available to the majority, and it was gone. You could see its absence on these main streets. It was traumatic. It’s become normal to people who live there, but you get people talking about it and there are ghosts everywhere. As one man said to me, if it had been a plague it would have been a historic event, but it was economic dislocation, so it’s considered a natural process.

Guernica:

It was your sense that it had become normal for the people going through it?

George Packer:

I didn’t sense that they thought it was normal, but that they had stopped thinking about it all the time because they had to live in it.•

Tags: ,

“To Add A Way For Authors To Sign E-Books…Would Be A Boon For Readers”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I buy books just to read them, so I don’t want any author signatures inside. I paid for that book! Do not write in it! But readers who’ve made the switch to ebooks will likely soon have the option of having them autographed. From Carolyn Kellogg at the Los Angeles Times:

“Want to hand over your iPad so an author can sign your e-book? You might be able to soon.

Apple has registered for a patent that would allow an e-book owner with an iPad get his or her book signed by an author. Readers might even be able to pose for a photo with the author as authentication to go with it — a photo that would go right into the e-book on the traditional signature page.

As Publishers Lunch tweeted Friday, the patent-following website Patently Apple has posted a description of the patent application. ‘On September 26, 2013, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals a new iBook autographing system and more specifically to techniques and systems for embedding autographs in electronic books,’ the report said.

To add a way for authors to sign e-books — and do something extra, like add a photo that would be embedded in the e-book — would be a boon for readers.”

“Technology Already Exists To Create Underwater Colonies”

September 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Prediction: I will never live in an undersea colony nor a space one. Not unless the only other option is living in Bay Ridge. Then, sure. But if you care to not reside on solid ground, underwater habitats are already feasible. From Rachel Nuwer at the BBC:

“According to [Ian] Koblick, the technology already exists to create underwater colonies supporting up to 100 people – the few bunker-like habitats in operation today providing a blueprint. ‘There are no technological hurdles,’ Koblick says. ‘If you had the money and the need, you could do it today.’ Beyond that number, technological advances would be needed to deal with emergency evacuation systems, and environmental controls of air supply and humidity.

With safety being paramount, operators assure underwater habitats are running smoothly by monitoring life support systems – air composition, temperature and humidity – from the surface. Above the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aquarius Reef Base, the third of the three existing facilities (which accommodates up to six aquanauts at a time), a bright yellow circular disc tethered to the undersea lab 60ft (18m) below collects data from a variety of sensors and sends it to shore via a special wireless internet connection. Future habitats could use satellites to communicate this important information. For now, energy independence is still a challenge. Sustainable future options might include harnessing wave action or placing solar panels on the surface.

Making larger habitats with multiple modules made of steel, glass and special cement used underwater would be simpler than trying to create one giant bubble. These smaller structures could be added or taken away to create living space for as many people as desired. Most likely, we wouldn’t want to build any deeper than 1,000ft (300m), because the pressures at such depths would require very thick walls and excessive periods of decompression for those returning to the surface. Koblick and his colleagues did not experience any ill effects from living below the surface for around 60 days, and he thinks stints up to six months would be feasible.”

Tags: ,

“What’s Making It Possible? Why Now?”

September 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Chris Anderson, former EIC at Wired, has expanded on his contention that smartphones are responsible for the developing drone market. He further believes that they’re also enabling self-driving cars. Two quotes from him.

From Wired, June 2012:

“Why? The reason is the same as with every other digital technology: a Moore’s-law-style pace where performance regularly doubles while size and price plummet. In fact, the Moore’s law of drone technology is currently accelerating, thanks to the smartphone industry, which relies on the same components—sensors, optics, batteries, and embedded processors—all of them growing smaller and faster each year. Just as the 1970s saw the birth and rise of the personal computer, this decade will see the ascendance of the personal drone. We’re entering the Drone Age.”

From Silicon Beat, September 2013:

“Drone and robot technology is at what Anderson is calling ‘the Macintosh moment,’ the turning point at which PCs went mainstream. What’s making it possible? Why now? From their components to the innovations springing up around them, the answer is smartphones, Anderson says.”

Tags:

“In Terms Of Books Or Things Written On Paper, Nothing Much Is Going To Change”

September 29, 2013 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1999,  Michael Crichton played what he knew to be a fool’s game and predicted the future. He was not so successful. Things he got wrong: Printed matter will be unchanged, movies will soon be dead, communications will be consolidated into fewer hands. Well, he did foresee YouTube.

Crichton, who was fascinated by science and often accused of being anti-science, commenting in a 1997 Playboy interview on technology creating moral quandries we’re not prepared for: “I think we’re a long way from cloning people. But I am worried about scientific advances without consideration of their consequences. The history of medicine in my lifetime is one of technological advances that outstrip our ethical systems. We’ve never caught up. When I was in medical school—30-odd years ago—people were struggling to deal with mechanical-respiration systems. They were keeping alive people who a few years earlier would have died of natural causes. Suddenly people weren’t going to die of natural causes. They were either going to get on these machines and never get off or—or what? Were we going to turn the machines off? We had the machines well before we started the debate. Doctors were speaking quietly among themselves with a kind of resentment toward these machines. On the one hand, if somebody had a temporary disability, the machines could help get them over the hump. For accident victims—some of whom were very young—who could be saved if they pulled through the initial crisis, the technology saved lives. You could get them over the hump and then they would recover, and that was terrific.

But on the other hand, there was a category of people who were on their way out but could be kept alive. Before the machine, ‘pulling the plug’ actually meant opening the window too wide one night, and the patient would get pneumonia and die. That wasn’t going to happen now. We were being forced by technology to make decisions about the right to die—whether it’s a legal or religious issue—and many related matters. Some of them contradict longstanding ideas in an ethically protected world; we weren’t being forced to make hard decisions, because those decisions were being made for us—in this case, by the pneumococcus.

This is just one example of an ethical issue raised by technology. Cloning is another. If you’re knowledgeable about biotechnology, it’s possible to think of some terrifying scenarios. I don’t even like to discuss them. I know people doing biotechnology research who have decided not to pursue avenues of research because they think they’re too dangerous. But we go forward without sorting out the issues. I don’t believe that everything new is necessarily better. We go forward with the technology while the ethical issues are still up in the air, whether it’s the genetic variability of crop streams, which is a resource in times of plant plagues, to the assumption that we all have to be connected all the time. The technology is here so you must use it. Do you? Do you have to have your cell phone and your e-mail address and your Internet hookup? I was just on holiday in Scotland without e-mail. I had to notify people that I wouldn’t be checking my e-mail, because there’s an assumption that if I send you an e-mail, you’ll get it. Well, I won’t get it. I’m not plugged in, guys. Some people are horrified: ‘You’ve gone offline?’ People feel so enslaved by technology that they will stop having sex to answer the telephone. What could be so important? Who’s calling, and who cares?”

“Eating Animals May Someday Seem Like A Quaint Relic Of A Bygone Era”

September 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Twenty years from now, will driverless, electric vehicles and lab-grown meat be the default mode? Both have the capacity to remake the world as a greener place and save countless lives, human and animal. Google has taken the lead in the former, scaring up all kinds of new competition, including Tesla. And the taste race is on in latter category. From a new Wired article by chef Alton Brown about Ethan Brown and his company, Beyond Meat, which is attempting to make a facsimile that’s as delicious as the original:

“So if you could consume a product that tasted and chewed like chicken in, say, half of your at-home or restaurant meals, would you? And what if that product delivered healthy protein with no antibiotics, cholesterol, trans fats, or saturated fat, yet required only a fraction of the resources to produce while creating little waste or environmental risks? Why wouldn’t you? Ethan Brown thinks you would, even if the price is a bit higher than skinless, boneless chicken breast.

Later, Brown, 42, insists that he isn’t really trying anything new. ‘You know, the harnessing of steam and then the development of the diesel engine removed the horse from the transportation equation while ultimately providing a better product for consumers,’ he says. By the same token, eating animals may someday seem like a quaint relic of a bygone era. I ask him if he’s really that close to a product that would make carnivores forget the succulence of critters. ‘We are obsessed with perfectly replacing the sensory experience of animal protein,’ Brown says. ‘We’re not 100 percent there yet. But we’re close.'”

Tags: ,

“Having Power Can Backfire”

September 29, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian interview with Malcolm Gladwell, in anticipation of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, his latest book of unconventional wisdom:

“The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn’t a miracle, he argues: it’s just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong. (Sample sentence: ‘Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.’)

‘With each book that passes, I think my personal ideology becomes more explicit … and this one is a very Canadian sort of book,’ says Gladwell, who was born in Fareham, in Hampshire, but grew up in Ontario. ‘It’s Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power. Someone told me – did you know that there’s never been a luxury brand to come from Canada? That’s never happened. That’s such a great fact to have about your home country.’

Difficulties and afflictions, the book shows, frequently foster creativity and resilience. Studies on ‘cognitive disfluency’ have shown that people do better at problem-solving tasks when they’re printed in a hard-to-read font: the extra challenge triggers more effortful engagement. We meet dyslexics whose reading problems forced them to find more efficient ways to master law and finance (one is now a celebrated trial lawyer, another the president of Goldman Sachs); we learn why losing a parent in childhood forges a resilience that frequently spurs achievement in later life, and why you shouldn’t necessarily attend the best university that will have you. (The answer is ‘relative deprivation’: the further you are from being the best at your institution, the more demotivating it is; middling talents perform better at middling establishments.) Conversely, having power can backfire, not least because it tricks the powerful into thinking they don’t need the consent of those over whom they wield it. In a compelling account of the Troubles, Gladwell argues that the British were plagued by a simple error: the belief that their superior resources meant ‘it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them.’ More isn’t always more.”

Tags: ,

“What A Boon To The Economy For Zero Effort!”

September 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m not an economist so I don’t know if a currency scheme cooked up by Douglas Coupland (also not an economist) would work or have unintended consequences, but here’s the gist of it from his Financial Times column:

“What if the government were to have, say, a ‘currency flush’? Basically, word could be broadcast that as of January 1 2016, the government will no longer honour any hundred-dollar bill printed before December 31 2013. People around the world with socks, suitcases and safety deposit boxes full of hundreds would have two years to redeem or spend their cash, and quick. What would happen?

Well, such a currency flush wouldn’t necessarily affect everyday people too much. People who work in bakeries, teach high school or drive taxis tend not to have suitcases full of hundreds in their universe – nor have much sympathy for those who do. But for those who do have stashes, there would be a two-year window to convert this cash into services and goods. The problem is that it looks very suspicious to walk into a Mercedes-Benz dealership and buy an S-Class with $87,000 in cash. Or to buy a Montauk summer house for millions. Or a boat. Or jewels. Or anything, really. Divesting oneself of soon-to-be valueless hundreds would require great skill in not drawing attention to oneself. At the very least, suitcase owners would be eating at expensive restaurants, buying expensive plane tickets and living it up for two brief years. What a boon to the economy for zero effort! And near the end of the flush, there might be a huge bump in the number of thousand-dollar lap dances and bar tips – but then that revenue would have to be recorded and taxed. More money in the coffers!

The Great Currency Flush would give the US economy a defibrillation of unparalleled voltage but, of course, there would have to be a few rules. For example, you couldn’t just take a hundred-dollar bill to the bank and say, ‘Give me five twenties.’ Once set in motion, the Flush would demand that hundreds could only be used in one go. You could buy a pack of gum with a hundred but you wouldn’t get back any change – so why not instead buy a hundred bucks of gum? The people selling the gum, in the meantime, would have to document where the hundreds all came from – not that hard to do. It’s also not hard to imagine many, many books in many, many places being very, very cooked.”

Tags:

“Chances Of Being Killed In A Mass Killing Are Probably No Greater Than Being Struck By Lightning”

September 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are modern problems: precious time wasted tweeting, people unduly worried about the casting of Batman, disgusting fast-food meals for children, a lack of privacy, etc. But, as hard as it might be to believe, we’ve never been safer or smarter. From Jesse Washington at AP:

“Global terrorism deaths as defined by the consortium reached almost 11,000 in 1984, then dipped before approaching 11,000 again in 1997. Deaths fell once more before rising in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. There were 3,144 killings in 2003, then 12,761 in 2007. In 2012, after the consortium made its data collection more comprehensive, it counted 15,514 deaths from terrorism — mostly in about 10 countries.

The Nairobi attack, by the fanatic Somali Islamic group al-Shabab, stood out. It touched points across the globe, killing at least 60 civilians from countries including Britain, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Peru, India, Ghana, South Africa and China. Five Americans were among the nearly 200 wounded.

Al-Shabab is ‘a threat to the continent of Africa and the world at large,’ Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said.

That attack came five days after a man who heard voices brought a shotgun through Navy Yard security and killed 12 people. It was the latest in a series of mass shootings, which are defined as killing four or more people: the December massacre of 26 in Newtown; 12 slain in a Colorado movie theater; other 2012 killings at a café, temple, sauna, colleges.

‘What troubles us so deeply as we gather here today is how this senseless violence that took place here in the Navy Yard echoes other recent tragedies,’ President Barack Obama said at a memorial service.

That’s not to mention the narrowly averted disasters: a man arrested this week on a charge he planned to shoot up a Salt Lake City mall; a gunman last month who was talked into laying down his weapon after invading a Georgia school.

Yet chances of being killed in a mass killing are probably no greater than being struck by lightning, according to Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass killings in America.” 

Tags:

“I Study When They Remember Things That Didn’t Happen”

September 28, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I guarantee you at least one thing that you believe occurred in your life didn’t happen. Or it didn’t happen close to the way you think it did or when. Maybe it’s a piece of a rationalization or dust from a dream that you came to accept as the real thing. And the more times you recall it, the more it becomes a part of your memory’s bedrock, the more “real” it seems. Usually these small malfunctions mean little. But sometimes they can have profound effects.

Elizabeth Loftus, who studies false memories, in a recent TED address.

Tags:

“I Can’t Get No…No, No, No”

September 28, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Saturday Night Live begins its 39th season tonight, and if I had to consider every musical performance in the show’s history, I would vote for Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” on the October 14, 1979 episode as the best of all. Performed just a week after the Rolling Stones was the program’s musical guest, this reimagination did for the head what Michael Jackson’s Motown 25 showstopper later did for the feet: It was moonwalking with the brain. They took the soul and put it into the machine.

Tags:

“32 Percent Say It’s Challenging Or Frustrating To Go Online”

September 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It seems impossible that a considerable number of Americans are willing and able to avoid the Internet, but it’s true. A breakdown of why they shun the dominant media of our time, from Greg Sterling of Marketing Land:

“In terms of the reasons for not going online, Pew found the following:

  • 34 percent believe the Internet isn’t relevant to their lives; they have no interest or need
  • 32 percent say it’s challenging or frustrating to go online; some of these people are also afraid of spam, spyware, and hackers’
  • 19 percent don’t want or can’t afford to pay for a computer and the associated access cost
  • 7 percent ‘cited a physical lack of availability or access to the Internet’

Some of these non-Internet users (44 percent) have asked family/friends to go online for them. Another group (23 percent) live in households where the Internet is available. And another contingent (14 percent) are ex-Internet users.

Most of these non-users are quite content to remain offline, with only 8 percent saying they would like to go online or use email. What that then suggests is that US Internet penetration has reached almost all of the ‘addressable market.'”

Tags:

“It’s Not A Zero-Sum Game”

September 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Economist Robert Reich, small but perky like a Tina Fey tit, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit to promote his new documentary, Inequality for All. He makes the comment that “the rich have done the best when everyone else is doing well.” That’s historically true, but have the rich ever done better than they’re doing now? (I’m talking about the super-rich, of course.) What’s really bad for most has been great for them. A few exchanges follow.

_________________________

Question:

Professor Reich, you are a noted supporter of free trade and outsourcing. From a neoliberal economics perspective, these policies are justifiable, but don’t they dramatically undermine the bargaining power of the American working class?

Robert Reich:

Not if they’re done correctly. For example, our trade treaties should require that our trading partners have a minimum wage that’s half their nations’ median wage (and we should do the same) — thereby helping ensure that the benefits of trade are spread widely.

_________________________

Question:

You appear to be a strong advocate for growing the economy as a way to pay off America’s debt obligations. What are your thoughts on the idea that economic growth is ultimately unsustainable, given the accelerated depletion of key natural resources that would be required to fuel such growth?

Robert Reich:

Growth isn’t the problem. It’s what the growth is used for. Rich economies have healthier environments than poor economies in large part because they can afford to protect their environments. Productivity gains — through invention and innovation — will enable us to save more energy in the future. But we need a carbon tax to get incentives right.

_________________________

Question:

Realistically, what are some policies that could pass this Congress that would be good for the country. We hear so much about what wouldn’t pass, but where is there bipartisanship. I’d love your input, Professor.

Robert Reich: 

I think the Democrats should introduce a bill to raise the minimum wage to at least $10.50/hour — which is what it would be if the 1968 minimum wage had just kept up with inflation. The vast majority of Americans agree. Many Republicans would come along. It would be a worthy fight.

_________________________

Question:

Professor Reich, I am a big fan and looking forward to seeing the film. However, I believe the rich & powerful in this country actively DO NOT want a successful middle class in the U.S., because that means the laborers have too much power. (Also a reason why they’re against Obamacare – health insurance binds people to jobs they hate.) As it is now, employees are scared to ask for raises and demand better working conditions. Multinationals can do better selling to China, India, Brazil etc. What can we do about this situation?

Robert Reich:

Look at American history and you’ll see that the rich have done the best when everyone else is doing well. Today’s rich would do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy (growing because the middle class and poor had a larger share) than their currently large share of an economy that’s barely growing at all. It’s not a zero-sum game.•

Tags:

“Clean Water May Be The Biggest Lifesaver In History”

September 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Why Are You Not Dead Yet?” Laura Helmuth’s recent Slate article examining how the American lifespan doubled in the last century and a half:

“How did we go from the miseries of the past to our current expectation of long and healthy lives? ‘Most people credit medical advances,’ says David Jones, a medical historian at Harvard—’but most historians would not.’ One problem is the timing. Most of the effective medical treatments we recognize as saving our lives today have been available only since World War II: antibiotics, chemotherapy, drugs to treat high blood pressure. But the steepest increase in life expectancy occurred from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Even some dramatically successful medical treatments such as insulin for diabetics have kept individual people alive—send in those #NotDeadYet stories!—but haven’t necessarily had a population-level impact on average lifespan. We’ll examine the second half of the 20th century in a later story, but for now let’s look at the bigger early drivers of the doubled lifespan.

The credit largely goes to a wide range of public health advances, broadly defined, some of which were explicitly aimed at preventing disease, others of which did so only incidentally. ‘There was a whole suite of things that occurred simultaneously,’ says S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Mathematically, the interventions that saved infants and children from dying of communicable disease had the greatest impact on lifespan. (During a particularly awful plague in Europe, James Riley points out in Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History, the average life expectancy could temporarily drop by five years.) And until the early 20th century, the most common age of death was in infancy.

Clean water may be the biggest lifesaver in history.”

Tags:

“More Than 40,000 People Adopted Hilda’s Number”

September 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A brief anecdote from Adrianne Jeffries at the Verge about how Social Security numbers, which were not actually intended to be national ID numbers, were misused and confused from the start:

“Social Security numbers were poorly understood from the beginning. In 1938, a leather factory in Lockport, New York attempted to capitalize on the excitement around the country’s newly-formed social insurance program by tucking duplicate Social Security cards into its wallets. Company vice president and treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be cute to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Schrader Whitcher.

Real Social Security cards had just begun circulating the year before, so many Americans were confused. Even though the display card was marked ‘specimen’ and sold at Woolworth’s, more than 40,000 people adopted Hilda’s number as their own. According to the Social Security Administration, no fewer than 12 people were still using their Woolworth’s-issued SSN in 1977.”

Tags: ,

“Maybe The Human Eye Can’t Do Better”

September 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I’ve said before that I favor computers calling balls and strikes in baseball as soon as that becomes viable. A human error can decide the outcome of a game, but it should be a miscue by a player, not an official. Until the system is automated, umpires should be paid much better than starvation wages in the minor leagues, which is the case now. With no guarantee of ever making it and no real salary, it’s hard to attract and keep the best. That leads to the most stubborn people, not the most qualified ones, ending up in the majors. That’s why you see so many argumentative umps in the bigs.

From “Five Important Issues for Next Commish.” by David Schoenfield at ESPN:

“Instant replay and quality of umpiring 

We finally get expanded replay next season, so that should help resolve some of the controversial and blown calls. It remains to be seen how effective and efficient the system will be, but it can be adjusted as necessary. Just as importantly, the new commissioner has to work to improve consistency of ball/strike calls and reduce the episodes of ump rage. 

Right now, the best umps (Eric Cooper, Chad Fairchild, Phil Cuzzi) get about 90 percent of ball/strike calls correct, according to our pitch data; the worst umps (Wally Bell, Tim Welke, Kerwin Danley, Jerry Meals) are at 86 percent. That difference may not seem like a lot, but that’s a spread of 10 incorrect calls per 250 pitches. Even a 90 percent correct rate means thebest umps are missing about 25 to 30 ball/strike calls a game. Maybe the human eye can’t do better, but MLB needs to pay its umpire better, and in particular pay minor league umpires a living wage, so you can recruit from a wider field of candidates.”

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »