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“Whatever The Value Of The Wisdom Of Crowds, It Isn’t Magic”

April 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a New Yorker blog post by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, about the epic fail of the Redditor throng during the Boston Massacre bombing manhunt:

“After Reddit’s attempt to find the Boston Marathon bombers turned into a major failure (for which Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin publicly apologized Monday), the over-all conclusion seems to be that the whole experiment was misguided from the start, and that the Redditors’ inability to identify the Tsarnaev brothers demonstrates the futility of using an online crowd of amateur sleuths to help with a criminal investigation. Or, as the Times’s Nick Bilton put it, ‘It looks as if the theory of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ doesn’t apply to terrorist manhunts.’

That proposition may be true. But Reddit’s failure isn’t evidence for it. To begin with, it’s a bit facile to frame this story as a competition between ‘the crowd’ and ‘the experts,’ since the official investigation wasn’t relying on a couple of experts, but rather had its own crowd at work, one made up, in Bilton’s words, of ‘thousands of local and federal officials.’ More important is that the Redditors faced a simple, but insuperable, obstacle when it came to identifying the Tsarnaevs, namely that the two brothers were not, as far as I can tell, in any of the photographs that were widely available before Thursday morning. The footage that convinced investigators that the Tsarnaevs were prime suspects was the footage from the Lord & Taylor surveillance cameras, which hadn’t (and still hasn’t) been released to the public. This is an obvious point, but one that’s been overlooked: Reddit had no real chance of identifying the right suspects because it didn’t have access to the information that mattered. (Had the clip of the Tsarnaevs walking down Boylston Street been publicly available last Tuesday, I don’t think there’s any doubt Redditors would have flagged them as suspicious.) Whatever the value of the wisdom of crowds, it isn’t magic:you can’t ask the crowd to find someone that, in a sense, it’s never seen.”

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“Please Select An Item From Our Menu”

April 25, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Touchscreens replacing workers at fast-food restaurant drive-thru windows. Like the Automat without the charm.

“Once You Create These Databases Is It Very Easy To Fall Into Function Creep”

April 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a discussion about why facial-recognition software didn’t work in the case of the Boston Marathon bombers but will likely be able to verify identity in such instances in the near future, Andrew Leonard of Salon asks Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Alessandro Acquisti about the potential downsides to improving this technology. The first part of his answer doesn’t bother me so much since witnesses and reporters and juries are very flawed anyway, but the second part does. An excerpt:

“Question:

Looking forward, are there reasons why improved facial recognition should worry us?

Alessandro Acquisti:

I am concerned by the possibility for error. We may start to rely on these technologies and start making decisions based on them, but the accuracy they can give us will always be merely statistical: a probability that these two images are images of the same person. Maybe that is considered enough by someone on the Internet who will go after a person who turns out to be innocent. There’s also the problem of secondary usage of data. Once you create these databases is it very easy to fall into function creep — this data should be used only in very limited circumstances but people will hold on to it because it may be useful later on for some secondary purpose.”

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“Smarter Driving Will Lead To More Driving”

April 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The Future of Driving” at the New York Times Economix blog, economist Casey B. Mulligan argues that the automation of cars may deliver an unintended consequence (more driving, thus more fuel consumption), though having these much lighter automobiles would seemingly offset that drawback. The opening of Mulligan’s post:

“Driverless vehicles would be a windfall for households and businesses that acquire them but would probably increase traffic and nationwide fuel usage.

Google and other innovators are working on vehicles that someday might drive themselves with little or no attention from human passengers. The vehicles of the future will have fast, observant computers that automatically communicate position and road conditions with other vehicles on the road.

Driverless vehicles are expected to help children, the blind, the elderly and others who currently cannot safely drive themselves. Helped by their huge amounts of data and computing power, driverless cars are also purported to reduce traffic congestion and nationwide fuel consumption by driving smarter.

But smarter driving will lead to more driving, because smarter driving reduces the cost per mile of vehicle usage. The end result of additional driving could be more traffic and more aggregate fuel consumption.”

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“Detroit Is Probably The Most Important Design Project Ever Undertaken By Americans (After The Founding Itself)”

April 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Motor City Breakdown,” Jerry Herron’s new Design Observer essay about the fall of Detroit and what it means for the rest of America:

“Why can’t we just get over Detroit — by common agreement, the most bankrupt, abandoned, misbegotten enterprise ever designed by Americans, at least so far as cities go — ‘the country’s most startling example of modern urban collapse,’ as the New York Times put it? Maybe it’s the sheer scale of the catastrophe being perpetrated here. The Times was reporting on the latest census of 700,000 souls, down from 1 million a decade ago and 1.8 million in 1950. Hardly a week goes by without national headlines about the murder rate or economic meltdown or impending civic bankruptcy (the biggest in U.S. history), or the Big Three automaker bailout, the corruption of public officials, the dumbfounding ineptitude of the electorate. Then there are the ruins that cast Detroit as a post-industrial Acropolis or Pompeii (except our ruins are larger), and the caravans of filmmakers and journalists and gawkers who want to get one last look, say one last word before the whole thing finally collapses. With all those end-of-everything narratives, you’d think by now we would have really reached the end — of conceivable stories, or patience — the end of Detroit as the ‘set for some movie about the last hours of the Planet Earth.’ That crack, by James Howard Kunstler, came 20 years ago, yet the end-of-time tourists keep returning to the set, locals too, which leads to my question: Why can’t we just let go? 

Our preoccupation with Detroit is no accident. Americans are a designer people, a society of immigrants whose only common experience on this continent is the experience of coming from someplace else, willingly or otherwise. We have no shared origin, whether natives or newcomers. Instead we were born of ideas memorialized in the Declaration and Constitution. So we come naturally by our obsession with design, Detroit being probably the most important design project ever undertaken by Americans (after the Founding itself) — “the Silicon Valley of the Jazz Age,’ as Mark Binelli so aptly describes it, ‘a capitalist dream town of unrivaled innovation and bountiful reward.’ But here’s the tricky part. Is the spectacular — and spectacularly represented — failure of Detroit indicative of some larger design fault inherent in the very nature of American ideas, or is it simply a local one-off, an exception without deeper meaning?”

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“The Internet Is The Largest Experiment Involving Anarchy In History”

April 23, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Liz Gannes’ All Things D article about Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s new book about our technological future:

“Written with Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age was released today. It’s dense, though readable, and floats between visions of a hologram-and-robot-enhanced future for the developed world, and scarily specific predictions of how dictators will get hold of technology and use it for evil.

‘The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,’ Schmidt and Cohen write, as they forecast all sorts of ‘painful liminal periods’ while things like privacy, citizenship and reporting get figured out as the next five billion people come online, joining the two billion that already are.

Schmidt and Cohen are not going to spark a social movement or even an op-ed war, a la that other recent tech exec book, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. But they did manage to write a surprisingly non-corporate book that talks about Twitter at least 10 times as much as it does about Google’s driverless cars.”

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Old Print Article: “Lombroso Tricked Again?” New York Times (1907)

April 23, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Lambroso thinks that these indications...prove that the prisoner is a degenerate and only slightly responsible for the crime."

“Lambroso thinks that these indications prove that the prisoner is a degenerate and only slightly responsible for the crime.”

Cesare Lombroso was a pioneering criminologist in the 19th century who helped establish the field, but his methods and assumptions were often somewhere south of bizarre. An excerpt about some of his quackery from an article in the August 4, 1907 New York Times:

“Paris–Prof. Cesare Lombroso, the well-known Italian criminologist, has written to Le Temps on behalf of Soleilland, the man under sentence of death in Paris for assaulting and murdering a little girl, the daughter of a couple with whom he was on friendly terms.

Lombroso calls attention to the peculiar shape of Soleilland’s right hand, the outer edge of which, instead of being slightly convex, is quite straight and forms a continuation of the line of the forearm. There is a wide gap between the third and fourth fingers, and the second and third are the same length. Instead of two oblique lines on the palm, there is only one straight line. All these signs are peculiar to what is called in neuropathology the monkey hand, as usually found in the lower apes, epileptics, idiots, and born criminals.

Lambroso thinks that these indications, taken in conjunction with the peculiar shape of the iris of Soleilland’s eye, prove that the prisoner is a degenerate and only slightly responsible for the crime. The professor suggests that President Fallieres ought to weigh the matter very carefully before ordering his execution.

"All these signs are peculiar to what is called in neuropathology the monkey hand."

“All these signs are peculiar to what is called in neuropathology the monkey hand, as usually found in the lower apes, epileptics, idiots, and born criminals.”

Unfortunately the weak point in Prof. Lombroso’s argument is that Bertillon, the head of the Police Anthropometrical Department, says that he has never photographed Soleilland’s hands, and it is extremely probable that the distinguished Italian is the victim of a practical joker.

This is not the first time. He had a similar mishap years ago. Lombroso asked Prince Roland Bonaparte to obtain photographs of hands of female criminals. Through a misunderstanding the Prince in applying to the Anthropometrical Department asked for photographs of the hands of workwomen. The photographs appeared a year later in a work by Lombroso, who described the hands as showing all kinds of criminal tendencies, whereas they really belonged to respectable, hardworking women employed at the Central Markets.

Since the Chamber of Deputies has disallowed the executioner’s salary, thus indirectly stopping capital punishment, thirty-four criminals have been sentenced to death and none of them has been guillotined. A marked recrudescence of crime has since occurred in Paris, with quite an epidemic of offenses against women and children. The Soleilland case has brought public feeling to a head, and now there is a strong demand for the revival of the death penalty.

Meanwhile, Soleilland’s spirits are reviving and he is telling his warders that when his sentence is commuted and he is sent out to New Caledonia or Guiana he hopes to settle down, lead a new life, and own a donkey cart.”

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“It’s Unprecedented In Medical Testing How Fast This Has Gone From Lab Research To Acceptance”

April 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

MIT’s Technology Review has just published its “10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2013.” Included on the list is Prenatal DNA Sequencing, which has the potential for great good and also some ethical quandaries. An excerpt:

“Earlier this year Illumina, the maker of the world’s most widely used DNA sequencing machines, agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars for Verinata, a startup in Redwood City, California, that has hardly any revenues. What Verinata does have is technology that can do something as ethically fraught as it is inevitable: sequence the DNA of a human fetus before birth.

Verinata is one of four U.S. companies already involved in a rapidly expanding market for prenatal DNA testing using Illumina’s sequencers. Their existing tests, all launched in the last 18 months, can detect Down syndrome from traces of fetal DNA found in a syringeful of the mother’s blood. Until now, detecting Down syndrome has meant grabbing fetal cells from the placenta or the amniotic fluid, procedures that carry a small risk of miscarriage.

The noninvasive screen is so much safer and easier that it’s become one of the most quickly adopted tests ever and an important new medical application for Illumina’s DNA sequencing instruments, which have so far been used mainly in research labs. In January, Illumina’s CEO, Jay Flatley, told investors that he expects the tests will eventually be offered to as many as two million women a year in the United States, representing half of all pregnancies—up from around 250,000 mothers, mostly older, who now undergo the invasive tests. ‘It’s unprecedented in medical testing how fast this has gone from lab research to acceptance,’ says Diana Bianchi, executive director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts University and the chief clinical advisor to Verinata. ‘It’s a huge impact for any technology in its first year.’

But this is likely to be just the start for prenatal DNA sequencing.”

“Paracetamol Seems To Have Reduced The Fundamental Anxiety Participants Felt”

April 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We tend to be more morally severe when we’re anxious, when we feel serious threat. But certain pharmaceuticals, even over-the-counter ones, can relieve stressful feelings. As we go forward, it will become easier and easier to do so. What will that mean for norms? From Nadira Faulmueller at Practical Ethics:

“In a now classical study people who objected to prostitution were asked to suggest a penalty for a woman arrested for prostitution. Participants who were led to reflect on their own mortality beforehand proposed a far higher bail than participants who thought about a less anxiety inducing topic. Such belief affirmation effects can also be evoked by psychologically disturbing experiences less severe than mortality salience. Hence, anxiety aroused by different situations can make our moral reactions more pronounced. 

Some days ago, an interesting study has been published in Psychological Science. The authors showed that the common over-the-counter pain reliever paracetamol counteracts the belief-affirming effect of anxiety. Participants who took a placebo showed the familiar response pattern in the ‘prostitution paradigm.’ They suggested a harsher penalty for the prostitute under mortality salience (a bail of around $450) compared to a control condition (around $300). Participants who took paracetamol, however, didn’t react on mortality salience. Independent of what they had reflected on before, they suggested the same penalty for the prostitute (around $300). Paracetamol seems to have reduced the fundamental anxiety participants felt due to the mortality salience manipulation, so they didn’t have to affirm their moral beliefs that strongly.”

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“Tip And I Don’t Often Share The Same Views”

April 22, 2013 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

William F. Buckley and Tip O’Neill reach across the aisle in 1988 to promote the U.S. Space Foundation. American space exploration lost course after the early 1970s, and it seems to only now be regaining momentum, thanks to a combination of public and private enterprises.

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“It Has Eyes, It Has Ears, It Has A Nervous System, It Has A Brain”

April 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Bullitt Center, a new Seattle office building opening today, Earth Day, is completely green and self-sustaining and automatically receives external data to help it operate in an optimal state. From Wendy Kaufman at NPR:

“‘In a building this size, any place else in Seattle it would have two elevators, and that’s what would face you as you walked in the front door. Here, the stairway is obvious and it’s attractive,’ says Denis Hayes, president and CEO of the foundation.

He explains there is an elevator, but it’s tucked away. The staircase encourages exercise and the concept saves money both in energy use and construction costs.

This is one of dozens of decisions and trade-offs that went into this building — a building Hayes describes as a living organism.

‘It has eyes, it has ears, it has a nervous system, it has a brain and it responds to its environment in a way that seeks to optimize things,’ he says.

He points across the street to a mini weather station. It sends data to the building so it can decide what it should do to maximize comfort and conserve energy.

Hayes says the building customizes windows and external shutter positions so natural lighting can be maximized to its potential and ‘give you day lighting at your desk.’

Just about everything in this building is off-the-shelf technology — from composting toilets to photovoltaic cells, which create electricity from sunlight, on the roof. But never before has all this technology been integrated into a single building quite this way.

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“The Planet Is Fine, The People Are Fucked”

April 22, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Even though I don’t care for nature and its constant state of murder and predation, I’m in favor of Earth Day in particular and environmentalism in general, believing that focus on alternative energy methods can reduce carbon emissions greatly–perhaps entirely. That might save you and I. But as George Carlin pointed out, we probably should rename this day since the Earth will be fucking fine without us. It would be even better. We’re the only ones we’re endangering with our profligate behavior. Let’s not be arrogant.

From Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the First Earth Day in 1970, footage of Paul Ehrlich, whose dire prediction of a “population bomb” that brought near-term famine, plague and thermonuclear war, proved incorrect. 

“Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control nature.”

Old Print Article: “Photographs By Telegraph–Television Next?” New York Times (1907)

April 21, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"We can now send a not too complicated photograph over very long distances in six to twelve minutes."

“We can now send a not too complicated photograph over very long distances.”

In the early years of the twentieth century, Professor Arthur Korn was conducting pioneering research into the development of the fax, which is still popular in certain places. A German of Jewish descent, the professor fled his home country in 1939 and emigrated to America, where he lived out his life. The opening of a November 24, 1907 New York Times article about Korn’s early telecommunications work, done in a time before world wars were even a thing, which seems to have resulted in the first facsimile ever sent:

“With the recent successful demonstration of Prof. Korn’s invention, by which photographs may be telegraphed from one part of the world to another, it seems not improbable that some day we may be able to see distant views through the aid of a telephone wire in the same way that we can now hear distant sounds.

That, at the first glance, may seem an impossibility; but no more impossible than the idea of telegraphing photographs would have appeared before its actual accomplishment.

The remarkable series of tests which demonstrated the practicability of the new invention took place in the office of The London Mirror on Nov. 7. The machine used in the test had been constructed for The Mirror by M. Carpenter of Paris. The receiving instrument was installed in the Paris office by L’Illustration, one of the leading pictorial journals of France.

Photographs–including one of the King–were both sent and received between London and Paris, a distance of 280 miles, and the eminently satisfactory results which were obtained came as a revelation to the distinguished company. Among the guests were several hundred who are prominent in science, art, politics, and journalism. This was the first time that photographs had been telegraphed from one capital to another, and Prof. Korn, the inventor, was the recipient of many congratulations, 

The first test was the sending of a photograph of King Edward to Paris, the whole operation taking only six minutes, at the end of which time the signal was given that the picture had been admirably reproduced in the Paris offices of L’Illustration.

Then a photograph was transmitted from Paris. A sensitive film was placed on a receiving cylinder, which is inclosed in a box, and as soon as the current was switched on the film began to slowly rotate and receive an exact copy of the film in Paris–an operation which again occupied six minutes.

The receiving film was then taken off the cylinder and an excellent photograph was printed from it amid the applause of the audience.

In a lecture given after the tests had been completed, Prof. Korn explained the working of his new system of photography. ‘We can now,’ he said, ‘send a not too complicated photograph over very long distances in six to twelve minutes. The problem of television, by which distant views are reproduced in a way similar to that by which we now hear distant sounds, has not yet been solved. Many bright minds are working upon it, but the great difficulty is the speed required. This must be a thousand times greater than the highest speed that has yet been obtained with telephotography.”

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“The picture you wish to have transmitted is taken to a sending station”:

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“Do You Consider Your Own Face Attractive?”

April 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We are informed, in part, to stimuli we receive from others, and no matter how strong-minded we are, it plays a role in wiring our brains. Reactions can help form actions, so to speak. A researcher who has done work in the science of facial attractiveness just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Do you consider your own face attractive?

Answer:

No.

Question:

Is that a gut reaction, or a scientific conclusion? 

Answer:

Well, that was just a quick reply at first…but I would say no based on external feedback and scientific analysis combined. Also, I was also a very good looking kid – and then after puberty, I turned into something totally different…so that was jarring & the change in how I was treated was hard to miss.

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Question:

Do you think someone can be attractive if they don’t fit exactly within what the science says is best? Have you ever thought someone was beautiful who didn’t fit into what you have researched?

Answer:

Yeah, there are a lot of other factors that can influence things from personality to body. And, subjective perceptions of attractiveness are 30-40% of the equation. The same is true in the opposite direction. People w/ perfect facial features who are depressed (in static photos) will be perceived as less attractive.

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Question:

What’s your most surprising discovery?

Answer:

The most surprising discovery to me (not in my lab but people I know) is that a man’s body odor (smelled by women) can reveal how symmetrical their faces and bodies are. And, this is often correlated to attractiveness. This was done by making men wear no deodorant and plain t-shirts for 2 weeks while college aged females came in to smell their BO & rate it… fun study. Some follow up studies debunked this slightly & added a few twits, but the gist is the same AFAIK…it’s been a while since I followed this line of research.

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Question:

I’ve been fascinated by the research into how women choose genetically alike males as mates when they are pregnant or on hormonal birth control (ie body thinks they’re pregnant) but genetically different men as mates when ovulating/not pregnant. And if women mate with a genetically similar partner they are more likely to cheat. It’s that whole good provider vs. good gene dynamic and it’s interesting because it complicates that simplistic theory that males just want to spread genetic material and women just want a provider mate. There’s biological machinations everywhere!

Answer:

Yay – you brought up what I actually worked on directly! I can elaborate on what you brought up or clear it up a little. When women are ovulating, they like the masculine male faced men. When they are on birth control, the preference is wiped out (and having a period on birth control is not a result of ovulation, which men don’t understand). Also, when they are not ovulating, they like the less masculine faces more. People have theorized that the “mate strategy” of a women is to marry a “neutral faced” provider and then have sex with the masculine pool boy or repairman when she’s ovulating. Masculine faced guys have better immune systems, but they are more aggressive and less faithful – so they are not great long term partners. The significance of this (since the 60s with so many women on birth control) may have altered our entire species in a direction that it previously was not headed in. Making the above comments that I did is seen as controversial, but it’s just a theory put out there by evolutionary psychologists.

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Question:

Is there a particular face shape that is deemed “most attractive”?

Answer:

Are you thinking about “round vs oval vs square”? Those terms are generally not descriptive enough – but I think the best way to answer this is that people with short mid-faces are the most attractive. To determine this for yourself, measure the distance between your pupils. Then, measure the distance between the top of your nose (the midpoint of your eyes), and the middle of your lips. Then divide these two numbers (with the eye number on top and the vertical number on the bottom). The lower the number is, the more compact your midface is and the more attractive you would tend to be. If it is 0.8-1.2 that is good. Outside of that range, it’s not so good…almost universally. Every other “face shape” question has a qualification.

 

“A World First From Durex”

April 19, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Sometimes you don’t want to be first in the world. This is one of those times. Fundawear from Durex. Do NOT masturbate during an electrical storm.

“Your Apartment Is An Electronic Orchestra”

April 19, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s difficult sometimes to think about futuristic living, all sleek and clean and perfect. Yesterday morning I sat down on a subway car next to a guy who smelled like a toilet had backed up onto a corpse in the bathroom of a diarrhea factory. Then he started snoring. 

But some among us can see a future, or something resembling it, that is more orderly. From a Foreign Policy piece about the predictions in Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s just-published book, The New Digital Age:

“Futuristic living:

Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. You head to the kitchen for breakfast and the translucent news display follows, as a projected hologram hovering just in front of you, using motion detection, as you walk down the hallway…. Your central computer system suggests a list of chores your housekeeping robots should tackle today, all of which you approve. It further suggests that, since your coffee supply is projected to run out next Wednesday, you consider purchasing a certain larger-size container that it noticed currently on sale online. Alternatively, it offers a few recent reviews of other coffee blends your friends enjoy.”

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“Bankrupt Corporations Get A General Discharge From Their Debts”

April 18, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Robert Kuttner’s New York Review of Books piece about David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a passage about the inequality of debt relief:

“The double standard in debt relief that favored large merchants, present at the creation of bankruptcy law in 1706, persists today in many different forms. It gets surprisingly little attention in the debt debates. Despite the tacit assumption that ‘surely one has to pay one’s debts,’ the evasion of repayment is both widespread and selective. Corporate executives routinely walk away from their debts via Chapter 11 of the national bankruptcy law when that seems expedient. Morality scarcely enters the conversation—this is strictly business.

Even more galling is the fact that the executives who drove the company into the ground often keep control by means of a doctrine known as debtor-in- possession. A judge simply permits the company to write off old debts, while creditors collect so many cents on the dollar out of available assets. Every major airline has now been through bankruptcy, and US Airways has gone in and out of Chapter 11 twice. In this process, all creditors are not created equal. Since banks typically have liens on the aircraft, bankers get paid ahead of others. Major losers are employees and retirees, since Chapter 11 allows a corporation to break a labor contact or reduce pension debts. Shareholders also lose, but by the time bankruptcy is declared, the company’s share value has usually dwindled to almost nothing. Much of the private equity industry uses the strategy of acquiring a company, taking it into bankruptcy, thus shedding its debts, and then cashing in on its subsequent profitability. Despite the misleading term private ‘equity,’ tax-deductible private debt is the essence of this industry, which relies heavily on borrowed money to finance its takeovers.

Homeowners, however, are explicitly prohibited from using the bankruptcy code to reduce their outstanding mortgage debt. White House legislation proposed in 2009 would have allowed a judge to reduce the principal on a home mortgage, as part of the effort to contain the economic crisis. Congress rejected the measure after extensive lobbying by the financial industry. Consumers may use bankruptcy to shed other debts, but a revision of the law signed by President Bush in 2005 subjects most bankrupt consumers to partial repayment requirements, while bankrupt corporations get a general discharge from their debts. Thanks to the influence of the same financial lobby, the rules of student debt provide that the obligations of a college loan follow a borrower to the grave.”

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“On The Frontier Of Old, One Expected To Find A Better Version Of The World Left Behind”

April 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Greg Klerkx’s Aeon essay, “Spaced Out,” a tidy explanation of how the “final frontier” differs from frontiers of old:

“Space tourism, driven by ‘astropreneurs’ such as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, will soon add hundreds of wealthy people to the astronaut ranks, but only for brief sojourns: they’ll reach suborbital space for a few quick minutes before returning to the atmosphere. Eventually, those high-paying tourists might want to stay awhile; Bigelow Aerospace has made no secret that its inflatables would be ideal for such a purpose, and the ISS has already hosted several tourists. Study upon study has indicated that many happy billions of dollars are there to be made in the human spaceflight business, which includes not just space labs, stations and hotels but also outposts on the moon and beyond.

Space futurists — many of whom I count as friends — can finally, and with some measure of reality, lay claim to the idea that we are on the verge of fulfilling the philosophical promise of the Space Age and becoming what the SpaceX founder Elon Musk describes as ‘a multi-planet species’. Certainly, it has taken longer than they’d hoped: the pace of the Apollo years was unsustainable, being largely fuelled by the geopolitics of the Cold War, and space bureaucracies have been slow to take advantage of entrepreneurial efficiencies. Space futurists argue that things are changing. They insist that a new Space Age is dawning. But what if the signs they see are only the last wispy auroras of the first one?

Whether launched for profit or pride, the ISS, Bigelow Aerospace and Chinese space stations are artifacts of a particular cultural moment, when living in space was thought to be the next step in humankind’s evolution. Space had become more than an ocean to traverse, paceKennedy. It had become, in that iconic Star Trek phrase, ‘the final frontier’.

I am as big a Star Trek fan as anyone, but I fear the frontier analogy misses the mark. On the frontier of old, one expected to find a better version of the world left behind: more land, more resources, more possibility. But the more we learn about ‘space’, the more we understand that living there would mean being forever enswathed in a portable bubble of Earth, with the goal being merely to survive.”

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“The Car Is Still A Long Way From Being A Mature Technology”

April 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The aviation industry is a miracle to me. There hasn’t been a fatal air crash in America in four years, fares are relatively inexpensive and carbon emissions are surprisingly low. The automotive industry, which initially had a huge advantage thanks to Henry Ford and his assembly line, only now seems to be catching up, with emphasis on lighter, smarter and more fuel-efficient vehicles, even driverless ones. From an Economist report about the future of cars in the global market:

“As an investment, then, the motor industry has to be treated with caution. But its engineering and environmental credentials are improving all the time. A century after becoming a mass-market product, the car is still a long way from being a mature technology. Manufacturers and their suppliers are investing huge sums in a variety of improved propulsion systems and in new lightweight materials to meet regulators’ emissions targets. The current generation of models is already vastly cleaner than earlier ones, and emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, soot and other pollutants are set to fall much further. The smog that began to afflict traffic-choked California in the 1950s and is now obscuring the sky in Chinese cities will gradually clear. The day may come when environmentalists stop worrying so much about cars and turn their attention to other polluters.

Consumers will be in heaven. Improved manufacturing systems will allow the bigger carmakers to offer an ever wider range of models, supplemented by a steady stream of niche products from new entrants. Fierce competition will keep prices down even as cars are packed with ever more technology that will make them more expensive to produce. More of them will drive themselves, park themselves and avoid collisions automatically. That should cut down on accidents and traffic jams, reduce the stress associated with driving and provide personal mobility for the growing ranks of the elderly and disabled.

All the technology that will go into making cars cleaner will also make them far more fuel-efficient and more economical. For motorists with short, predictable daily drives, all-electric cars may prove adequate and, as batteries improve, increasingly cost-effective. Others will be able to pick from a range of propulsion systems, including hybrid, natural gas and hydrogen as well as improved petrol or diesel engines, to suit their needs.”

“There Are People In Positions Of Great Authority Who Know Very Little About Film”

April 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Video killed the radio star, but algorithms got the American film critic.

The Digital Age has made it easy for Netflix and others to tell you what you would like to see without reading film criticism or even watching thumbs point north or south. And the global market for movies has birthed the creation of one comic-book blockbuster after another, heavy on action and effects and light on dialogue, moving many of the better creators of personal storytelling to cable television. These shifts have sent film critics the way of travel agents.

However, Jonathan Rosenbaum, legendary arbiter of the Chicago Reader, pushes back at the idea that the Digital Age is a death knell for cinema writers. His best argument: Many of the most high-profile, pre-Netflix movie-reviewing slots were filled by hacks who knew little. That’s true. It’s hard to deny, though, that the vocation–not avocation–has cratered. From John Lingan’s Los Angeles Review of Books piece about Rosenbaum during the so-called twilight of the critics:

“For the Love of Movies is a grim tale of extinction, in which [Gerald] Peary guides the audience through the marquee names in American movie writing from Frank E. Woods to Harry Knowles before asking us to mourn the dozens of critics who have lost their jobs since the recession began. Throughout the film, headshots of former critics flash like a succession of milk carton children. And in a final gesture that no other audience member seemed to find as comically melodramatic as I did, the final credits rolled over a contemporary rendition of Stephen Foster’s Civil War–era ballad for the downtrodden, ‘Hard Times Come Again No More.’

Ten minutes into the Q&A, Rosenbaum pushed back against Peary’s negativity, as I expected he might.

When the moderator suggested that nonprofessional film bloggers lack a proper appreciation for the history of cinema, Rosenbaum declared, ‘To be quite frank, the whole time I’ve been involved in film criticism, I’ve never understood what the difference is between professionalism and amateurs. There are people in positions of great authority who know very little about film, and people who are considered amateurs who know a great deal.’

Rosenbaum’s career has been marked by this disregard for accepted hierarchies. In London in the early 1970s, he reviewed everything from the British Film Institute’s revivals to soft-core porn movies. At the Reader, he paid equal attention to the multiplex, art houses, and museum programming. And, in response to the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the ‘100 Greatest American Movies,’ Rosenbaum published his own top 100, which included experimental works and documentaries alongside lush Hollywood moneymakers like An Affair to Remember. ‘If these lists have any purpose at all from our standpoint (as opposed to the interests of the merchandisers),’ he argued:

this is surely to rouse us out of our boredom and stupor, not to ratify our already foreshortened definitions and perspectives. Above all, the impulse to provide another list is to defend the breadth, richness, and intelligence of the American cinema against its self-appointed custodians, who seem to want to lock us into an eternity of Oscar nights.

Addressing Peary on the National Gallery stage, Rosenbaum said, ‘My biggest problem with [For the Love of Movies] is you focused too much on American film criticism,’ eliciting a mild gasp from the crowd for spoiling the heretofore united front. Peary made the reasonable defense that his limited budget and running time didn’t allow him the luxury of a global view, but Rosenbaum had mounted one of his favorite hobbyhorses and wasn’t about to dismount.

‘The great possibility of the Internet is its internationalism,’ he continued. Few critics Rosenbaum’s age have embraced this ‘great possibility’ so forcefully. He spoke admiringly of the young, unpaid writers and unprofitable web magazines that, in the liveliness of their thought and content, often eclipse even hallowed print journals like Film Comment or Sight & Sound.”

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“Scenes Like This Are Becoming Commonplace In U.S. Cities”

April 17, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

To celebrate 40 years since the first cell phone call, here’s a Motorola promotional video from the tool’s second decade.

“Self-Publishing — Including Distribution Digitally Or As Print On Demand — Has Become More And More Popular, And More Feasible”

April 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Why would established authors continue to work for publishing companies instead of putting out their own books? I suppose if there is a bucket of money involved, it might make sense to be owned rather than to own, but as publishers continue to be undone by technological tumult, they have fewer dollars to pay except for blockbusters, and they do less and less in terms of fact-checking, publicity, etc. In fact, the only reason there will soon be to publish a printed book is for vanity, the ego-stroking joy of having a printed-and-bound product to show off. 

David Mamet has made the only intelligent decision, going the lone-wolf route with his forthcoming book. From Leslie Kaufman in the New York Times:

“As digital disruption continues to reshape the publishing market, self-publishing — including distribution digitally or as print on demand — has become more and more popular, and more feasible, with an increasing array of options for anyone with an idea and a keyboard. Most of the attention so far has focused on unknown and unsigned authors who storm onto the best-seller lists through their own ingenuity.

The announcement by ICM and Mr. Mamet suggests that self-publishing will begin to widen its net and become attractive also to more established authors. For one thing, as traditional publishers have cut back on marketing, this route allows well-known figures like Mr. Mamet to look after their own publicity.

Then there is the money. While self-published authors get no advance, they typically receive 70 percent of sales. A standard contract with a traditional house gives an author an advance, and only pays royalties — the standard is 25 percent of digital sales and 7 to 12 percent of the list price for bound books — after the advance is earned back in sales.”

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“The Chip Sports…Everything A Body Needs To Be A Basic Tiny Computer”

April 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a Wired report by Tim Maly at Wired a microchip by Freescale that is so small that, yes, it can be swallowed:

“Chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor has created the world’s smallest ARM-powered chip, designed to push the world of connected devices into surprising places.

Announced today, the Kinetis KL02 measures just 1.9 by 2 millimeters. It’s a full microcontroller unit (MCU), meaning the chip sports a processor, RAM, ROM, clock and I/O control unit — everything a body needs to be a basic tiny computer.

The KL02 has 32k of flash memory, 4k of RAM, a 32 bit processor, and peripherals like a 12-bit analog to digital converter and a low-power UART built into the chip. By including these extra parts, device makers can shrink down their designs, resulting in tiny boards in tiny devices.

How tiny? One application that Freescale says the chips could be used for is swallowable computers. Yes, you read that right. ‘We are working with our customers and partners on providing technology for their products that can be swallowed but we can’t really comment on unannounced products,’ says Steve Tateosian, global product marketing manager.”

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“Hasn’t Time Been Collapsing For Centuries?”

April 16, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, discussing the anarchic nature of the flow of time in the Digital Age in a New York Times interview conducted by Quentin Hardy:

Question:

You say we have ‘a new relationship with time.’ What is it, and why is that a bad thing?

Douglas Rushkoff:

What we’ve done has made time even more dense. On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next. Present shock interrupts our normal social flow.

It didn’t have to be this way. When digital culture first came along, it was supposed to create more time, by allowing us to shift time around. Somehow instead we’ve strapped devices to ourselves that ping us all the time.

Question:

Hasn’t time been collapsing for centuries? We moved from the rhythm of seasons to living by the clock in the Industrial Age. We’ve paced in front of the microwave for decades.

Douglas Rushkoff: 

Yes, but it has hit a point where we have lost any sense of analog time, the way a second hand sweeps around a clock. We’ve chosen the false ‘now’ of our devices. It has led to a collapse of linear narratives and a culture where you have political movements demanding that everything change, now. The horrible truth is we are linear beings; we can’t multitask, and we shouldn’t keep interrupting important connections to each other with the latest message coming in.

Question:

It’s a funny thing: the counterculture used to talk about ‘Be here now,’ and the need to chase after self-awareness by seeking the eternal present. What is the difference between that world of the “now” and this one?

Douglas Rushkoff:

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we’ve learned about them.•

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“There Is A Huge Savings In Lives”

April 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mark Jacobson has crafted a plan that contends that New York State can fulfill all its energy needs by 2030 sans fossil fuels or carbon emissions, simply using WWS (Wind, Water, Sun). He discusses the major obstacles and criticisms of the plan in a Scientific American interview conducted by Mark Fischetti. An excerpt:

“Question:

What are the main obstacles to such a sweeping overhaul at a state or national level?

Mark Jacobson:

The main obstacles are political and social—getting politicians onboard. There are always local zoning issues. I’m sure there will be a big push by the gas lobby and the oil lobby against this.

Question:

So then how do you sell the plan?

Mark Jacobson:

There is a huge savings in lives. The New York plan would prevent 4,000 mortalities a year in the state due to less air pollution, and a related savings of $33 billion—about 3 percent of the GDP of the state. That resonates more with people than climate change issues. We also looked at job creation; more jobs would be created than lost.

Question:

The main criticism about heavy reliance on wind and solar power is that the sources are intermittent: the wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t shine at night. Do your plans rely a lot on energy storage, which remains a tough challenge?

Mark Jacobson:

If you get the [power] transmission grid right you don’t need a whole lot of storage. By combining wind and solar and geothermal and hydroelectric, you can match the power demand. And if you oversize the grid, when you’re producing extra electricity you use it to produce hydrogen [for fuel-cell vehicles and ships as well as some district heating and industrial processes]. You can also spread the peak demand by giving financial incentives [for consumers to use power at off-peak times]. Some storage certainly would help; we have storage in the form of hydrogen and in concentrated solar power plants. There are many ways to tackle the intermittency issues.

Question:

The other concern that is usually raised about renewable energy is that it is more expensive than fossil fuels. What would electricity prices be like in New York?

Mark Jacobson:

The residential electricity cost in the U.S. on average is 13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. In New York it’s 18.1 cents. If you look at the states that have the highest percentage of electricity generation from wind, the average electricity price increase from 2003 to 2011 was 2 cents a kilowatt-hour, whereas all the other states averaged 3.6 cents. So prices in the states that didn’t put in a lot of wind went up more.”

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