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“Can A Man Retain His Sanity While Cooped Up With Many Other Men In A Crowded Area For More Than Thirty Months?”

January 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From 1952-54, Collier’s published a series of articles under the exclamatory rubric “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” In the final piece, “Can We Get to Mars?” Wernher von Braun, erstwhile Nazi, and Cornelius Ryan, the Irish journalist who penned The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, examined the obstacles to be overcome if we were to visit our inhospitable neighbor. A passage about the profound psychological challenges of passing time in space:

When Men Live Too Close Together

During that time they will live, work and perform all bodily functions within the cramped con- fines of a rocket-ship cabin or a pressurized—and probably mobile—Martian dwelling. (I believe the first men to visit Mars will take along inflatable, spherical cabins, perhaps 30 feet across, which can be mounted atop tractor chassis.) Even with plenty of oxygen, the atmosphere in those living quarters is sure to pose a problem.

Within the small cabins, the expedition members will wash, perform personal functions, sweat, cough, cook, create garbage. Every one of those activities will feed poisons into the synthetic air—just as they do within the earth’s atmosphere.

No less than 29 toxic agents are generated during the daily routine of the average American household. Some of them are body wastes, others come from cooking. When you fry an egg, the burned fat releases a potent irritant called acrolein. Its effect is negligible on earth because the amount is so small that it’s almost instantly dissipated in the air. But that microscopic quantity of acrolein in the personnel quarters of a Mars expedition could prove dangerous; unless there was some way to remove it from the atmosphere it would be circulated again and again through the air-conditioning system.

Besides the poisons resulting from cooking and the like, the engineering equipment—lubricants, hydraulic fluids, plastics, the metals in the vehicles—will give off vapors which could contaminate the atmosphere. 

What can be done about this problem? No one has all the answers right now, but there’s little doubt that by using chemical filters, and by cooling and washing the air as it passes through the air-conditioning apparatus, the synthetic atmosphere can be made safe to live in.

Besides removing the impurities from the man-made air, it may be necessary to add a few. Man has lived so long with the impurities in the earth’s atmosphere that no one knows whether he can exist without them. By the time of the Mars expedition, the scientists may decide to add traces of dust, smoke and oil to the synthetic air—and possibly iodine and salt as well. 

I am convinced that we have, or will acquire, the basic knowledge to solve all the physical problems of a flight to Mars. But how about the psychological problem? Can a man retain his sanity while cooped up with many other men in a crowded area, perhaps twice the length of your living room, for more than thirty months?

Share a small room with a dozen people completely cut off from the outside world. In a few weeks the irritations begin to pile up. At the end of a few months, particularly if the occupants of the room are chosen haphazardly, someone is likely to go berserk. Little mannerisms—the way a man cracks his knuckles, blows his nose, the way he grins, talks or gestures—create tension and hatred which could lead to murder.

Imagine yourself in a space ship millions of miles from earth. You see the same people every day. The earth, with all it means to you, is just another bright star in the heavens; you aren’t sure you’ll ever get back to it. Every noise about the rocket ship suggests a breakdown, every crash a meteor collision. If somebody docs crack, you can’t call off the expedition and return to earth. You’ll have to take him with you.

The psychological problem probably will be at its worst during the two eight-month travel periods. On Mars, there will be plenty to do, plenty to see. To be sure, there will be certain problems on the planet, too. There will be considerable confinement. The scenery is likely to be grindingly monotonous. The threat of danger from some unknown source will hang over the explorers constantly. So will the knowledge that an extremely complicated process, subject to possible breakdown, will be required to get them started on their way back home. Still,

Columbus’ crew at sea faced much the same problems the explorers will face on Mars; the fifteenth-century sailors felt the psychological tension, but no one went mad.

But Columbus traveled only ten weeks to reach America; certainly his men would never have stood an eight-month voyage. The travelers to Mars will have to, and psychologists undoubtedly will make careful plans to keep up the morale of the voyagers.

The fleet will be in constant radio communication with the earth (there probably will be no television transmission, owing to the great distance). Radio programs will help relieve the boredom, but it’s possible that the broadcasts will be censored before transmission; there’s no way of telling how a man might react, say, to the news that his home town was the center of a flood disaster. Knowing would do him no good—and it might cause him to crack.

Besides radio broadcasts, each ship will be able to receive (and send) radio pictures. There also will be films which can be circulated among the space ships. Reading matter will probably be carried in the form of microfilms to save space. These activities—plus frequent intership visiting, lectures and crew rotations—will help to relieve the monotony.

There is another possibility, seemingly fantastic, but worth mentioning briefly because experimentation already has indicated it may be practical. The nonworking members of a Mars expedition may actually hibernate during part of the long voyage. French doctors have induced a kind of artificial hibernation in certain patients for short periods, in connection with operations for which they will need all their strength (Collier’s, December 11, 1953—”Medicine’s New Offensive Against Shock,” by J. D. Ratcliff). The process involves a lowering of the body temperature, and the subsequent slowing down of all the normal physical processes. On a Mars expedition, such a procedure, over a longer period, would solve much of the psychological problem, would cut sharply into the amount of food required for the trip, and would, if successful, leave the expedition members in superb physical condition for the ordeal of exploring the planet.

Certainly if a Mars expedition were planned for the next 10 or 15 years no one would seriously consider hibernation as a solution for any of the problems of the trip. But we’re talking of a voyage to be made 100 years from now; I believe that if the French experiments bear fruit, hibernation may actually be considered at that time.

Finally, there has been one engineering development which may also simplify both the psychological and physical problems of a Mars voyage. Scientists are on the track of a new fuel, useful only in the vacuum of space, which would be so economical that it would make possible far greater speeds for space journeys. It could be used to shorten the travel time, or to lighten the load of each space ship, or both. Obviously, a four-or-six-month Mars flight would create far fewer psychological hazards than a trip lasting eight months.

In any case, it seems certain that the members of an expedition to Mars will have to be selected with great care. Scientists estimate that only one person in every 6,000 will be qualified, physically, mentally and emotionally, for routine space flight. But can 70 men be found who will have those qualities—and also the scientific background explore Mars? I’m sure of it.•

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“In Recent Years More People Have Abandoned Than Taken Up The Game”

January 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

George Carlin thought the two biggest wastes of space on Earth were graveyards and golf courses. Raze them and build housing for homeless people, he suggested. Both don’t just demand valuable real estate but also tax the environment, particularly the latter with its expansive greens, needing constant watering to keep brown blades at bay. For reasons other than conservation, the sport’s popularity has been on the wane in America and most of the world outside Asia, participation severely dipping. From an Economist article about the future of golf:

“As America prospered, public courses opened alongside private clubs and exposed more people to the sport. Real estate helped drive its rise. Between 1992 and 2002, at least 60% of new golf courses were tied to property developments, according to Richard J. Moss, author of The Kingdom of Golf in America, a rich history of the sport. Golf courses increased the value of surrounding homes, and developers built long, complicated courses with the hope of attracting tournaments and attention.

Today America is the largest golf market by a long shot. Around half the world’s golf courses and players are thought to be in America, and the sport contributes around $70 billion to America’s economy according to a 2011 study. Golf is not unlike a first home or a college degree: it carries the allure of progress, of arrival in the middle class. Only a few years ago some golf gurus forecast that the sport would grow even more, as baby boomers retired and flocked to the fairways.

They were wrong. Last year around 25m people played golf, 18% fewer than did so in 2006, although the population grew by 6%. Although still played by men and women, including businesspeople hoping to bond over more than lunch, golf does not hold the same appeal for the young and minorities, groups that will determine its future health. In recent years more people have abandoned than taken up the game.

Emerald courses have not been the source of riches many anticipated. There are simply too many of them. Last year 160 of the country’s 14,600 18-hole equivalent golf facilities shut up shop, the eighth straight year of net closures, according to the National Golf Foundation, an industry group. Steve Skinner of Kemper Sports, a large golf-course operator, thinks it is going to take another ten years to level the imbalance between supply and demand. With only a handful of new courses scheduled for construction in America, architects are looking abroad to find work. ‘If golf-course architecture were a publicly traded stock, it would be a penny stock right now,’ says Brian Curley, an architect who spends much of his time designing courses in China.”

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“The Days When English Shared The Planet With Thousands Of Other Languages Are Numbered”

January 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his speculative WSJ essay, “What the World Will Speak in 2115,” the linguist John McWhorter forecasts the future of verbal communication on Earth. Unsurprisingly, he believes it will be a flatter and less diverse world, a village increasingly global. History will need a huge interruption for this contraction, which has its pluses and minuses, to not occur. An excerpt:

“Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.

But the existence of so many languages can also create problems: It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding. One might even ask: If all humans had always spoken a single language, would anyone wish we were instead separated now by thousands of different ones?

Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.”

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“Here’s Where The Dapper Italian Philosopher Comes In”

January 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Professor Luciano Floridi is an adviser to Google, but he could unofficially be called the search giant’s Philosopher-in-Chief. A metaphysician who turned his attention to information and privacy in order to address the needs of his age, Floridi is the academic thinker trying to help steer the company through uncharted, ethically choppy waters. From “Google’s Philosopher,” a Pacific-Standard profile by Robert Herritt:

“In 2010, a Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja González appealed to Spain’s national Data Protection Agency to have an embarrassing auction notice for his repossessed home wiped from a newspaper website and de-indexed from Google’s search results. Because the financial matter had been cleared up years earlier, González argued, the fact that the information continued to accompany searches of his name amounted to a violation of privacy.

The Spanish authorities ruled that the search link should be deleted. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice upheld the Spanish complaint against Google. Since then, Google has received more than 140,000 de-linking requests. Handling these requests in a way that respects both the court and the company’s other commitments requires Google to confront an array of thorny questions. When, for instance, does the public’s right to information trump the personal right to privacy? Should media outlets be consulted in decisions over the de-indexing of news links? When is it in the public interest to deny right-to- be-forgotten requests?

Here’s where the dapper Italian philosopher comes in. Floridi is a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, and he is the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute. For more than a decade, he has distanced himself from the sort of conventional Anglo-American philosophy that occupied him for much of his early career. Driven by the idea that, as he put it to me, ‘philosophy should talk seamlessly to its time,’ he has set about developing a new approach to his discipline that he calls the philosophy of information. Floridi has described PI, as it is known, as his attempt to provide ‘a satisfactory way of dealing with the new ethical challenges posed by information and communication technologies.’ And, wouldn’t you know it, Google happens to be in the market for just that.

Although difficult to summarize, Floridi’s program comes down to this: For anyone who wants to address the problems raised by digital technologies, the best way to understand the world is to look at everything that exists—a country, a corporation, a billboard—as constituted fundamentally by information. By viewing reality in these terms, Floridi believes, one can simultaneously shed light on age-old debates and provide useful answers to contemporary problems.

Consider his take on what it means to be a person. For Floridi, you are your information, which comprises everything from data about the relations between particles in your body, to your life story, to your memories, beliefs, and genetic code. By itself, this is a novel answer to the perennial question of personal identity, which has preoccupied philosophers since at least Plato: What defines the self as a coherent entity over time and space? But Floridi’s view can also help us think precisely about the consequential questions that today preoccupy us at a very practical level.”

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“TV Would Trivialize What The Book Jacket Calls ‘Politics, Education, Religion, And Journalism'”

January 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even before binge-viewing and such media gorging became a thing, before it was technologically convenient to watch a season in a sitting, social critic Neil Postman believed we were amusing ourselves to death, though he didn’t live long enough to watch us kick dirt on our graves. The opening of Scott Timberg’s new Salon piece about Postman, “Meet the Man who Predicted Fox News, the Internet, Stephen Colbert and Reality TV“:

“These days, even the kind of educated person who might have once disdained TV and scorned electronic gadgets debates plot turns from Game of Thrones and carries an app-laden iPhone. The few left concerned about the effects of the Internet are dismissed as Luddites or killjoys who are on the wrong side of history. A new kind of consensus has shaped up as Steve Jobs becomes the new John Lennon, Amanda Palmer the new Liz Phair, and Elon Musk’s rebel cool graces magazines covers. Conservatives praise Silicon Valley for its entrepreneurial energy; a Democratic president steers millions of dollars of funding to Amazon.

It seems like a funny era for the work of a cautionary social critic, one often dubious about the wonders of technology – including television — whose most famous book came out three decades ago. But the neoliberal post-industrial world now looks chillingly like the one Neil Postman foresaw in books like Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. And the people asking the important questions about where American society is going are taking a page from him.

Amusing Ourselves didn’t argue that regular TV shows were bad or dangerous. It insisted instead that the medium would reshape every other sphere with which it engaged: By using the methods of entertainment, TV would trivialize what the book jacket calls ‘politics, education, religion, and journalism.’

‘It just blew me away,’ says D.C.-based politics writer Matt Bai, who read the 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death while trying to figure out how the press and media became obsessed with superficiality beginning in the ‘80s. ‘So much of what I’d been thinking about was pioneered so many years before,” says Bai – whose recent book, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, looks at the 1987 Gary Hart sex scandal that effectively ended the politician’s career. ‘It struck me as incredibly relevant … And the more I reported the book, the more relevant it became.'”

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“Like Beached Whales, Dead Malls Draw Fascination As Well As Dismay”

January 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Malls aren’t going away, but some types are, mainly the lower-end and un-smart kind. Surprisingly, the bricks aren’t disappearing because of clicks, as online retail has had little to do with the emergence of these latter-day ghost towns. From a passage about the real reason for the ruins from Nelson D. Schwartz of the New York Times:

“One factor many shoppers blame for the decline of malls — online shopping — is having only a small effect, experts say. Less than 10 percent of retail sales take place online, and those sales tend to hit big-box stores harder, rather than the fashion chains and other specialty retailers in enclosed malls.

Instead, the fundamental problem for malls is a glut of stores in many parts of the country, the result of a long boom in building retail space of all kinds.

‘We are extremely over-retailed,’ said Christopher Zahas, a real estate economist and urban planner in Portland, Ore. ‘Filling a million square feet is a tall order.’

Like beached whales, dead malls draw fascination as well as dismay. There is a popular website devoted to the phenomenon — deadmalls.com — and it has also become something of a cultural meme, with one particularly spooky scene in the movie Gone Girl set in a dead mall.

‘Everybody has memories from childhood of going to the mall,’ said Jack Thomas, 26, one of three partners who run the site in their spare time. ‘Nobody ever thinks a mall is going to up and die.'”

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“We Have Entered A New Age Of Space Fantasy—One With Mars As Its Ruling Hallucination”

January 2, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ken Kalfus, author of the wonderful short story collection Thirst, among other books, has written an n+1 piece in which he advocates for an unmanned mission to Alpha Centauri and strongly doubts the plausibility of a mission to Mars–soon or perhaps ever–let alone the planet’s colonization, believing there will be no refuge for us in outer space from Earth’s ultimate rejection of our species, noting soaring costs, low political will and high radiation levels. All that’s true, and pipe dreams like Mars One won’t get off the ground, though ever is a mighty long time. An excerpt:

A half-century after the conclusion of the Apollo mission, we have entered a new age of space fantasy—one with Mars as its ruling hallucination. Once again stirring goals have been set, determined timetables have been laid down, and artist’s renderings of futuristic spacecraft have been issued. The latest NASA Authorization Act projects Mars as the destination for its human spaceflight program. Last month’s successful test flight of the Orion space vehicle was called by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden ‘another extraordinary milestone toward a human journey to Mars.’ The space agency’s officials regularly justify the development of new rockets, like the Space Launch System, as crucial to an eventual Mars mission.

But human beings won’t be going to Mars anytime soon, if ever. In June, a congressionally commissioned report by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, punctured any hope that with its current and anticipated level of funding NASA will get human beings anywhere within the vicinity of the red planet. To continue on a course for Mars without a sustained increase in the budget, the report said, “is to invite failure, disillusionment, and the loss of the longstanding international perception that human spaceflight is something the United States does best.”

The new report warns against making dates with Mars we cannot keep. It endorses a human mission to the red planet, but only mildly and without setting a firm timetable. Its “pathways” approach comprises intermediate missions, such as a return to the moon or a visit to an asteroid. No intermediate mission would be embarked upon without a budgetary commitment to complete it; each step would lead to the next. Each could conclude the human exploration of space if future Congresses and presidential administrations decide the technical and budgetary challenges for a flight to Mars are too steep.

The technical and budgetary challenges are very steep. A reader contemplating them may reasonably wonder if it’s worth sending people to Mars at all.•

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“Being Responsible For Watching Somebody Isn’t A Pleasant Job At All”

January 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I use to think that because of the efficacy of the tools we have created and are going to create, that the structure of surveillance couldn’t be dismantled no matter how much we wanted it to be. But a few years back I began to believe that most Americans wanted to watch and be watched, that we like the new abnormal more than we wanted to admit. The information titillated, the attention flattered. There are costs, however, for being on either side of the lens, and we’re all on both now. From Hans de Zwart’s Matter piece, “Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future“: 

“After 81 days of staying in a cell he was released and could return to his home and studio in Beijing. His freedom was very limited: they took away his passport, put him under house arrest, forbid him to talk with journalists about his arrest, forced him to stop using social media and put up camera’s all around his house.

Andreas Johnsen, a Danish filmmaker, has made a fantastic documentary about the first year of house arrest. 

A fascinating element of the documentary is that you can see Ai Weiwei constantly experimenting with coping strategies for when you are under permanent surveillance. At some point, for example, he decided to put up four cameras inside his house and livestream his life to the Internet. This made the authorities very nervous and within a few days the ‘WeiWeiCam’ was taken offline.

Close to his house there is a parking lot where Ai Weiwei regularly catches some fresh air and walks in circles to stay in shape. He knows he is being watched and is constantly on the lookout for the people watching him. In a very funny scene he sees two undercover policemen observing him from a terrace on the first floor of a restaurant. He rushes into the restaurant and climbs the stairs. He stands next to the table that seats the agents, who at this point try and hide their tele-lensed cameras and look very uncomfortable. Ai Weiwei turns to the camera and says: ‘If you had to keep a watch on me, wouldn’t this be the ideal spot?’

This scene shows how being responsible for watching somebody isn’t a pleasant job at all.”

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“Why Can’t We Do This Here?”

January 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A switch to electric cars which get energy from solar sources is seen by some conservatives as a vast left-wing conspiracy, but California’s Governor Ronald Reagan, still the GOP standard-bearer, was completely on board with subsidizing EVs when he first witnessed the Enfield 8000 in 1969. An excerpt follows from a 2013 BBC article.

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“In November 1969, the Enfield 8000 was shown off at the first ever international symposium on electric vehicles, held in Phoenix, Arizona, where it caught the eye of Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California.

“We took a truck across America with two Enfields on the back,” says Sir John Samuel, who was leading the delegation. “Some people just looked at them and laughed, but Ronnie Reagan was astounded, and he said, ‘Why can’t we do this here?'”

Governor Reagan offered to find a factory site in California, promising healthy subsidies and guaranteed orders. He even suggested giving the cars to all home-buyers on the island of Santa Catalina off the California coast, where the use of petrol-driven vehicles was – and still is – heavily restricted.

But Enfield Automotive’s owner John Goulandris, who was from a wealthy Greek shipping family, turned down Reagan’s offer and chose to continue production in Cowes on the Isle of Wight.•

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The original BBC report about the Enfield 8000 at the 1:15 mark:

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“In This New Digital Universe Where Words Have Broken Free Of Their Traditional Covers, Arguments Flow Faster And Fiercer Than Ever”

January 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I know the Internet is freer, fuller and more democratic–and I love it–but I’m glad I was raised in a time of traditional magazines, an era approaching endgame in many essential ways. When I was a kid, I would go to used-magazine stores in Manhattan and trade in copies of a few of these for some of those, usually Mad for baseball or baseball for Mad, which introduced me to statistics and satire and so much more. Everything wasn’t at your fingertips, so you had to use your legs to get such backdated periodicals. What a genius invention–pages contained beneath a cover, hand-crafted and magical.

In a Los Angeles Review of Books article inspired by the recent implosion at The New Republic, David A. Bell succinctly sums up a time when the information flows, when home pages, like house organs, have arrived at obsolescence, when even online magazines–any magazines–seem to be beside the point. An excerpt:

“If the sheer economics of the digital age is not necessarily dooming the larger project that began in the 18th century, other elements of digital publication and politics have already fundamentally changed its nature. Most importantly, with the coming of social media and news aggregators, an increasing number of readers no longer interact with entire publications, or even large chunks of them. From the early 18th century to the late 20th, readers had only one way to read a magazine: they held the entire issue in their hands. They might only read a few articles, but they had all the others literally at their fingertips. Even in the early days of the internet, most online reading started with a visit to a website that put some or all of a magazine’s current articles on the same page, with links helpfully underlined. But today, more and more, readers encounter only the disjecta membra of publications that social media and aggregators have broken up. They no longer even visit the front page of a website. Although a dedicated reader of TNR until December, in recent years I rarely visited its website, instead relying on Twitter, Facebook, and RSS readers to bring me the magazine’s individual articles as they went live. And I read these articles alongside a host of others from publications I didn’t subscribe to, whose websites I never visited, and which in some cases I had never even heard of. But friends would post pieces on social media, or other articles would link to them. (I presume the same is true of the way many of you are reading this essay, right now.) Back in the days of print, once I paid for a magazine, I had an obvious material incentive to read everything in it, rather than go out and purchase something else. Now, most of the articles I read cost me nothing to access. All in all, I pay far less attention than I once did to where a particular article originally appeared; I rarely pause, like many other readers presumably, to consider how editors might have shaped it, behind the scenes. When I read a magazine on paper, on the other hand, its overall editorial project still imposes itself strongly on my reading response.

In this new digital universe where words have broken free of their traditional covers — and reading so easily turns into skimming — arguments flow faster and fiercer than ever, but they are atomized, and hyper-accelerated. A group of authors may momentarily coalesce to argue a particular point — the way commentators from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Corey Robin came together to say ‘good riddance’ to TNR. But then the molecules of argument break apart again in the constant flow. In this universe where unified magazines are dissolving, it is becoming far harder for a group of editors and writers to have the sort of durable influence that TNR acquired at moments in its past, notably in the 1980s. For all the excellent articles that the surviving weekly magazines still publish, their existence as distinct editorial projects jibes poorly with the way more and more of its readers actually read.”

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“Nowadays, Everyone Can Be Frankenstein And His Monster”

January 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The Lives of Ronald Pinn” in the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan begins with a meditation on the creepy true-life practice of undercover UK police who secretly, for four decades, assumed the identities of actual people who’d died as children or young adults, using the deceased to construct new personas for themselves in order to stealthily investigate the activities of left-wing groups. They acquired backstories and “continued” the lives. It was grave robbery as identity theft, something like fan fiction married to police work. 

During the age of the Internet, such fictionalizing has even greater consequences. In what’s an admittedly very dubious ethical act, O’Hagan then creates a fake identity from the titular Mr. Pinn, a South Londoner who presumably died of a heroin overdose in 1984, discovering how easy it still is to raise the dead and breathe something like life into it, to acquire every last ungodly thing on the Dark Internet under the alias, and how much this falsification resembles much of what the average person really does in our time of avatars, usernames, purchased followers, “friends” and cryptocurrency. An excerpt:

“Stories of people pretending to be other people, of people feeling impelled to confect, imitate or perform themselves, describe a change not just in the technological basis of our lives but in the narrative strategies now available to us. You could say that every ambitious person needs a legend to deepen their own. Last year Manti Te’o, an exceptional Hawaiian linebacker, a Mormon who played for Notre Dame, found his when he told the sad story of having to succeed for his team after his 22-year-old girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died of leukaemia. Despite his grief, the footballer stormed up the field, making 12 tackles in one game, before appearing on news programmes to talk about his heartbreak and to quote from the letters Lennay had written him during her terrible illness. Problem was: the girlfriend never existed. She was a complete invention – the photographs on social media sites were of a girl he’d never met. He’d missed Lennay’s funeral, Te’o said, because she insisted that he not miss the game. There are hundreds of stories like this, where ‘sock-puppet’ accounts on Facebook and elsewhere have allowed a ‘person’ – sometimes a whole ‘family’ – to put together a life that’s much bigger than the real one. The Dirr family from Ohio solicited sympathy and dollars for years after losing loved ones to cancer – a small village of more than seventy invented profiles shored up the lie. It was all the work of a 22-year-old medical student, Emily Dirr, who’d been inventing her world since she was 11. Her life was a reality show that she produced, cast, directed, starred in, and broadcast to the world under a pile of aliases that felt entirely real and moving to a large group of devoted followers.

By the middle of last summer, Ronnie Pinn had a Gmail account and an aol account, as well as accounts on Craigslist and Reddit. It took the best part of a week to install and run the software necessary to get the bitcoins he needed to confirm his existence. I bought them with a credit card – hundreds of pounds’ worth – on computers that couldn’t be traced back to me. In each case they had to be ‘mixed’, or laundered, before Ronnie could buy things. Around every corner on the web is a scam, and the Ronnie I invented had to negotiate with some of the dodgiest parts of the World Wide Web. He now had currency; next he got a fake address. I used an empty flat in Islington, where I would go to collect his mail, the emptiness of the hall seeming all the emptier for the pile of mail on the floor, addressed to someone who didn’t exist but was more demanding than many who did.

It wasn’t long before I saw Ronnie’s face on a driving licence. It took a few weeks to secure a passport. The seller was on the dark net website Evolution; having gathered all ‘Ronnie’s’ information, he produced scans on which the photographs were missing. Then he disappeared. This is common enough: the sellers no less often than those seeking to buy their wares are crooks. Another seller produced the documents quite quickly and with everything in place anyone could have been fooled. Not perhaps the e-passport gates at Heathrow, but a British passport is a gateway ID to many other forms of ID, as well as to a world of legitimacy. Slowly and digitally, ‘Ronnie’ began to be a man who had everything, a face, an address, a passport, discount cards. He began to have conversations with real people on Reddit, or people who might have been real, and his Twitter and Facebook life showed him to be a creature of enthusiasm and prejudice. Nowadays, everyone can be Frankenstein and his monster, both the hare-brained dreamer and his gothic offspring, and the enabling technology seems to encourage the idea. Ronnie, in the world, was a figment, but on discussion boards he was no less believable than anybody else. ‘Friend’ has become a verb, leaving the old world of ‘befriend’ to hint at warm handshakes and eyes that actually met. People ‘friend’ people on Facebook and they get ‘friended’, but many of them will never meet. Elsewhere on the net the connections may lead to a cold presence, a person who is legitimate but non-existent. Ronnie’s social interaction online could be involved and energetic and characterful, but it seemed that everyone he met had a self to hide and nothing to show for themselves beyond their quips and departures. At one point, Ronnie’s Twitter account got hacked and he was invaded by hundreds of robotic right-wing followers. His ‘information’ had opened him up to being exploited by spam-bots, by other machines, and by web detritus that clings to entities like Ronnie as a matter of digital course. None of these everyday spooks came in from the cold, and Ronnie moved, as if by osmosis, into the more criminal parts of the internet, where the clandestine earns its keep.”

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“It Requires You To Let Big Brother Track You, With A Portable Phone”

January 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Long before Snowden, Richard Stallman warned of the surveillance state to little effect, a Cassandra of the Cloud. In “Why You Should Not Use Uber,” he continues to rail against a new machine he sees as soulless. An excerpt follows.

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• It requires you to let Big Brother track you, with a portable phone.

  • Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay.
  • Uber also records where you get the cab and where you go with it.
  • Uber’s clever policy of not being directly responsible for anything that goes wrong extends to harassment by drivers, and its practice of identifying passengers enables drivers to find out who the passenger is. This makes some women scared to use Uber.This problem comes directly out of the practices listed above that mistreat all users of Uber.
  • Uber is an unregulated near-monopoly, so it can cut rates for drivers arbitrarily.

Drivers are starting to complain that they’re left with little money for their work.

Uber drivers are getting shafted; Uber can arbitrarily cut their pay, and they have to work 15 hours a day. Some are trying to unionize.

We should not accept the whitewash label of ‘sharing economy’ for companies like Uber. A more accurate term is ‘piecework subcontractor economy.’

It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that’s what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don’t need to be employed.•

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“They’re All Talking About The Remarkable Podcast Serial”

January 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think they should all be in prison: Adnan, Jay, Sarah Koenig, the listeners, the MailChimp.

The whole Serial thing made me uncomfortable for many reasons–clumsy journalistic practices, race, class, true crime, celebrity–and a Liberal Arts major who knows just when to pause when reading a radio script can’t make that go away. To be fair, I think the popular podcast did shine a light on the huge holes that often exist in policing and in the justice system, and perhaps in its own bumbling way, the show will lead to some greater resolution of a dicey case.

Because he’s Alan Dershowitz, Alan Dershowitz gives his two cents at the Guardian. The opening:

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked whether I think that Adnan Syed ‘did it’, whether he received a fair trial and whether he has any chance of getting his conviction and life sentence reversed.

The answer to the first question is ‘I don’t know’; to the second, ‘no’; and to the third, ‘it will be an uphill struggle, but it is possible – largely due to the podcast itself.’

So many people ask because they’re all talking about the remarkable podcast Serial, which documents the factual weaknesses – and strengths but mostly weaknesses – in the prosecution and conviction of Adnan Masud Syed for the murder of his former girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999 when they were both high school students in Baltimore, Maryland. Sarah Koenig, who narrates and co-produces the podcast, turned her reporting about the case into a worldwide conversation about justice, doubts and the limitations of the American legal system.

Koenig, who has re-examined almost every aspect of the prosecution’s case from multiple angles, came to an uncertain conclusion: she believes Syed is probably not guilty, but she can’t swear to it. The evidence she presents raises considerable doubts about the prosecution’s case, but also leaves open the possibility that Syed committed the murder for which he is serving time in prison.”

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“Suspended In A Gondola Beneath The Airships, Astronauts Would Not Have To Contend With The Physical Challenges Of Zero Gravity”

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

The odds of NASA funding a floating airship city 30 miles above Venus that’s capable of sheltering a human community are not very hopeful, but that type of research is going on with the HAVOC project. From Peter Shadbolt at CNN:

“Venus has the advantage of being much closer to Earth. Its minimum distance to Earth is 38 million kilometers, compared with 54.6 million to Mars.

‘The kind of multi-decade mission that we believe could succeed would be an evolutionary program for the exploration of Venus, with focus on the mission architecture and vehicle concept for a 30-day crewed mission into Venus’s atmosphere,’ he said.

At the heart of the concept is the logistically difficult task of sending a spacecraft into the atmosphere of Venus without landing it.

The HAVOC model involves placing the astronauts inside an ‘aeroshell’ that would enter the atmosphere at 4,500 miles per hour.

Decelerating during its descent to just 450 meters per second and then deploying a parachute, the shell would fall away to reveal a folded airship. Robotic arms would unfurl the blimp which would be inflated with helium to allow the airship to float 30 miles above the planet’s fiery surface.

Jones said the key technical challenges for the mission include performing the ‘aerocapture’ maneuvers at Venus and Earth (the process of entering the orbit of both planets), inserting and inflating the airships, and protecting the solar panels and structure from the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere.

‘With advances in technology and further refinement of the concept, missions to the Venusian atmosphere can expand humanity’s future in space,’ he said.

Permanent mission

Ultimately, NASA could seek a permanent manned presence in Venus’s atmosphere.

Suspended in a gondola beneath the airships, astronauts would not have to contend with the physical challenges of zero gravity, where weightlessness causes muscles to wither and bones to demineralize.”

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“The Obvious Inspiration For All This Is Uber”

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

The Uberization of the economy is a very convenient thing unless you’re one of those employed within that system. Then you could be inconvenienced. This cultural shift may be good or ill for workers in the long run depending on whether other companies utilize Uber’s rapacious business practices. From an Economist story about the proliferation of the Peer Economy in America, in which not everyone is an equal:

“Handy is one of a large number of startups built around systems which match jobs with independent contractors on the fly, and thus supply labour and services on demand. In San Francisco—which is, with New York, Handy’s hometown, ground zero for this on-demand economy—young professionals who work for Google and Facebook can use the apps on their phones to get their apartments cleaned by Handy or Homejoy; their groceries bought and delivered by Instacart; their clothes washed by Washio and their flowers delivered by BloomThat. Fancy Hands will provide them with personal assistants who can book trips or negotiate with the cable company. TaskRabbit will send somebody out to pick up a last-minute gift and Shyp will gift-wrap and deliver it. SpoonRocket will deliver a restaurant-quality meal to the door within ten minutes.

The obvious inspiration for all this is Uber, a car service which was founded in San Francisco in 2009 and which already operates in 53 countries; insiders say it will have sales of more than $1 billion in 2014. SherpaVentures, a venture-capital company, calculates that Uber and two other car services, Lyft and Sidecar, made $140m in revenues in San Francisco in 2013, half what the established taxi companies took (see chart 1), and the company shows every sign of doing the same wherever local regulators give it room. Its latest funding round valued it at $40 billion. Even in a frothy market, that is a remarkable figure.

Bashing Uber has become an industry in its own right; in some circles, though, applying its business model to any other service imaginable is even more popular.”

“A New Class Of Speculators Has Emerged With Crasser Objectives”

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

Faustian art-world figure Stefan Simchowitz, whose aggressive promotion and popular Instagram account grow art stars and his own bank account, sees himself as a Silicon Valley-ish disruptor of traditional dealers, a popularizer of the “Post-Internet” school, while he makes many others just see red, believing him more Wall Street-esque predator than patron, a philistine who flips collages like condos. Certainly not the first article about the Google Era anti-gallerist but one of the best is “The Art World’s Patron Satan,” Christopher Glazek’s just-published New York Times Magazine profile. An excerpt:

“Since 2007, Simchowitz has sponsored and promoted roughly two dozen young artists. In addition to arranging sales for their work, Simchowitz often provides them with a studio, purchases their materials, covers their rent and subsidizes their living expenses. Perhaps most consequentially, he also posts photos of them and their work on his influential Instagram account, thereby creating what he calls ‘heat’ and ‘velocity’ for the artists he supports, who have included market darlings like the Colombian Oscar Murillo, the Japanese-American Parker Ito and the Brazilian Christian Rosa, all under the age of 35. But Simchowitz’s methods call down the opprobrium of art-world stalwarts, who are contemptuous of his taste, suspicious of his motives and fearful of his network’s potential to subvert the intricate hierarchies that have regulated art for centuries.

Reputations in the art world are forged over many years across countless fairs, openings, reviews and dinners. Although laypeople may look at a $30 million Richter and compare it to splatters from a second grader, Richter’s prices are determined not by chance but by the elaborate academic, journalistic and institutional infrastructure the art world has built to mete out prizes and anoint the next generation of cultural torchbearers. The collector class has traditionally come from the very top of the wealth spectrum and has included people looking to trade money for social prestige by participating in the art world’s stately rituals. Over the last few years, though, a new class of speculators has emerged with crasser objectives: They are less interested in flying to Basel to attend a dinner than in riding the economic wave that has caused the market for emerging contemporary art to surge in the past decade.

Critics charge that Simchowitz often preys on vulnerable young artists without gallery representation — some say without talent — and buys up huge quantities of their work, then flips the pieces back and forth at escalating prices among a cultivated group of buyers: a network of movie stars, professional poker players, orthodontists, nightclub promoters, financiers, football players and corned-beef magnates, many of whom hold Simchowitz in such high esteem that they’re willing to purchase the pieces he acquires for them sight unseen, artist unnamed. In March, in an online screed for New York magazine, the art critic Jerry Saltz tore into Simchowitz with unusual ferocity, dubbing him a ‘Sith Lord’ and the Pied Piper of the ‘New Cynicism.’ Simchowitz’s artists may enjoy a temporary surge in prices, his critics argue, but they typically see little of the upside; in any case, or so the story goes, once their bubbles pop, they’re left for dead.”

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“The Money, In Economic Terms, Is Not Worth Protecting”

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

Via the wonderful Longreads, I came across Geoff Manaugh’s 2013 Cabinet piece about Los Angeles’s 1990s reputation as bank robbery capital of the world, which includes an extended meditation on the inscrutable and illegal exploits of the “Hole in the Ground Gang,” which attempted to mole its way to millions. The opening:

“In the 1990s, Los Angeles held the dubious title of ‘bank robbery capital of the world.’ At its height, the city’s bank crime rate hit the incredible frequency of one bank robbed every forty-five minutes of every working day. As FBI Special Agent Brenda Cotton—formerly based in Los Angeles but now stationed in New York City—joked at an event hosted by Columbia University’s school of architecture in April 2012, the agency even developed its own typology of banks in the region, most notably the ‘stop and rob’: a bank, located at the bottom of both an exit ramp and an on-ramp of one of Southern California’s many freeways, that could be robbed as quickly and as casually as you might pull off the highway for gas.

In his 2003 memoir Where The Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World, co-authored with Gordon Dillow, retired Special Agent William J. Rehder briefly suggests that the design of a city itself leads to and even instigates certain crimes—in Los Angeles’s case, bank robberies. Rehder points out that this sprawling metropolis of freeways and its innumerable nondescript banks is, in a sense, a bank robber’s paradise. Crime, we could say, is just another way to use the city.

Tad Friend, writing a piece on car chases in Los Angeles for the New Yorker back in 2006, implied that the high-speed chase is, in effect, a proper and even more authentic use of the city’s many freeways than the, by comparison, embarrassingly impotent daily commute—that fleeing, illegally and often at lethal speeds, from the pursuing police while being broadcast live on local television is, well, it’s sort of what the city is for. After all, Friend writes, if you build ‘nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets’ in one city alone, you’re going to find at least a few people who want to really put those streets to use. Indeed, Friend, like Rehder, seems to argue that a city gets the kinds of crime appropriate to its form—or, more actively, it gets the kinds of crime its fabric calls for.

Of course, there are many other factors that contribute to the high incidence of bank robbery in Los Angeles, not least of which is the fact that many banks, Rehder explains in his book, make the financial calculation of money stolen per year vs. annual salary of a full-time security guard—and they come out on the side of letting the money be stolen. The money, in economic terms, is not worth protecting.”

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“The Issue Of Lawsuits Regarding The Cars Will, I Think, Be Vastly Overwhelmed By A Huge Reduction In Collisions”

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

Incremental introduction of driverless features will likely gradually diminish auto-related accidents and deaths, but if Google has truly cracked the code of visual recognition, then the process speeds forward. From Jacob Gershman at WSJ:

“Will Google’s self-driving car put a dent in personal-injury lawsuits?

Google, which just announced a ‘fully functional’ prototype of its self-driving car, is looking for auto industry partners to bring the technology to market within the next five years.

Watching those developments, legal blogger Eric Turkewitz, a personal injury lawyer with the Turkewitz Law Firm in New York, wonders what a future of Google cars will mean for his industry. Writes Mr. Turkewitz:

The issue of lawsuits regarding the cars will, I think, be vastly overwhelmed by a huge reduction in collisions that result from the most common forms of human error. Each year about 30,000 people will die in the U.S. from car crashes, and about two million are injured, and that is after considering a significant drop in fatalities from safer cars and seat belts over the prior decades….

And what will those newfangled cars do? They will see the other cars/pedestrians and slow down or stop despite the driver being lost in thought elsewhere. Or drunk. Or asleep.”

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“It Was A Technological Improvement”

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

A piece of Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia being interviewed by Tom Snyder in 1981. Along with the author’s infamous Acid Tests, government-run LSD experiments in 1960s Palo Alto are also a topic of conversation. After some jesting, Kesey gives a very candid response to the question of whether drugs had injured him: “You don’t get anything for free.”

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“The More People That Share The Use Of Cars, The Less Likely It Is To Cost Each Individual”

December 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While searching for an image for a different post, I came across this scanned 1971 Motor Trend article about a computerized and automated vehicle-rental system called Select-A-Car, which was the brainchild of Minicars founder, Don Friedman. A credit-card swipe in a vending machine would dispense the keys for a low-emission compact, which the renter would pick up and drop off at a convenient lot. It was planned for use in airports, bus terminals and commercial and apartment buildings. The company believed that this early version of ridesharing–a proto-Zipcar, really–could reduce ownership and promote a greener environment, but the idea never gained traction. Click on the article to read a larger version.

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“The Effects Of This Technology Will Change The Economics Of Virtually Every Industry”

December 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We’ve heard it before, but Anthony Wing Kosner of Forbes makes a compelling case that AI and Deep Learning are set to mature at a blinding pace, investment in these sub-sectors having reached critical mass. The opening:

“Despite what Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk say, hostile Artificial Intelligence is not going to destroy the world anytime soon. What is certain to happen, however, is the continued ascent of the practical applications of AI, namely deep learning and machine intelligence. The word is spreading in all corners of the tech industry that the biggest part of big data, the unstructured part, possesses learnable patterns that we now have the computing power and algorithmic leverage to discern—and in short order.

The effects of this technology will change the economics of virtually every industry. And although the market value of machine learning and data science talent is climbing rapidly, the value of most human labor will precipitously fall. This change marks a true disruption, and there are fortunes to be made. There are also tremendous social consequences to consider that require as much creativity and investment as the more immediately lucrative deep learning startups that are popping up all over (but particularly in San Francisco.).”

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“Children, He Believed, Should Be Raised In An Environment Of ‘Unconditional Positive Regard'”

December 28, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A person isn’t merely a “satchel full of dung” as Bishop John Fisher argued in 1535, the year he was beheaded by King Henry VIII, but a surfeit of pride is just as bad as one of shame, maybe worse. In the middle of last century, psychiatry began trying to convince us we weren’t sinners but winners, as the “self-esteem movement” kickstarted with good intentions by Dr. Abraham Manslow began to take hold, even if there wasn’t much hard data to support its efficacy. Dissent eventually came from controversial research psychologist Roy Baumeister, son to a father driven by immense self-importance. The opening of Will Storr’s Matter piece, “The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego“:

“FOR MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY, our beliefs have been based on the assumption that people are fundamentally bad. Strip away a person’s smile and you’ll find a grotesque, writhing animal-thing. Human instincts have to be controlled, and religions have often been guides for containing the demons. Sigmund Freud held a similar view: Psychotherapy was his method of making the unconscious conscious, helping people restrain their bestial desires and accord with the moral laws of civilization.

In the middle of the 20th century, an alternative school of thought appeared. It was popularized by Carl Rogers, an influential psychotherapist at the University of Chicago, and it reversed the presumption of original sin. Rogers argued that people are innately decent. Children, he believed, should be raised in an environment of ‘unconditional positive regard.’ They should be liberated from the inhibitions and restraints that prevented them from attaining their full potential.

It was a characteristically American idea—perhaps even the American idea. Underneath it all, people are good, and to get the best out of themselves, they just need to be free.

Economic change gave Rogers’s theory traction. It was the 1950s, and a nation of workmen was turning into a nation of salesmen. To make good in life, interpersonal sunniness was becoming essential. Meanwhile, rising divorce rates and the surge of women into the workplace were triggering anxieties about the lives of children born into the baby boom. Parents wanted to counteract the stresses of modern family life, and boosting their children’s self-esteem seemed like the solution.

By the early 1960s, wild thinkers in California were pushing Rogers’s idea even further. The ‘human potential movement’ argued that most people were using just 10 percent of their intellectual capacity. It leaned on the work of Abraham Maslow, who studied exceptional people such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt and said there were five human needs, the most important of which was self-actualization—the realization of one’s maximum potential. Number two on the list was esteem.

At the close of the decade, the idea that self-esteem was the key to psychological riches finally exploded. The trigger was Nathaniel Branden, a handsome Canadian psychotherapist who had moved to Los Angeles as a disciple of the philosopher Ayn Rand. One of Rand’s big ideas was that moral good would arise when humans ruthlessly pursued their own self-interest. She and Branden began a tortuous love affair, and her theories had an intense impact on the young psychotherapist. In The Psychology of Self-Esteem, published in 1969, Branden argued that self-esteem ‘has profound effects on a man’s thinking processes, emotions, desires, values and goals. It is the single most significant key to his behavior.’ It was an international bestseller, and it propelled the self-esteem movement out of the counterculture and into the mainstream.”

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A 30-minute 1971 film about Maslow’s philosophical descendants.

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“Others Reckon Markets Often Go Haywire”

December 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Tulowitzkis, like tulips, are prone to the irrational exuberance of marketplaces. The father of the modern baseball card just passed away, and an Economist piece reminds that speculation for this paper-based memorabilia packaged with bubble gum has proven no more resistant to bubbles than tech stocks or real estate. An excerpt:

Through the 1970s cards appealed mostly to kids interested in finding pictures of their heroes, or in completing a collection. Yet a subtle change was under way. Older aficionados, many of whom had been building their collections for decades, began swapping cards and hunting for especially rare and valuable specimens. One such cardhound, a professor of statistics named James Beckett, began polling traders on the prices they had seen or paid for particular cards. In 1979 he put together the first edition of what would become a regular price guide. In late 1984 the Beckett guide went monthly, the better to capitalise on soaring interest. Not long after that your correspondent took up collecting cards, just as that interest was turning into a speculative fervour.

Mr Beckett may not deserve sole credit for the baseball-card bonanza, but it is hard to imagine the mania having erupted without him. In the 1970s only aficionados knew that unique cards were fetching higher prices at trade shows and auctions. Beckett Baseball Card Monthly helped create a much larger market for the cards. Readers everywhere could see how prices were moving around the country, and decide to sell old memorabilia—or fill their attics with cards in anticipation of future price rises.

Economists have wrestled with the question of whether markets are “efficient” or not for more than half a century. Eugene Fama was awarded a Nobel prize in 2013 for pioneering work demonstrating that markets quickly incorporate new information and cannot systematically be beaten. Yet others reckon markets often go haywire. Robert Shiller, for instance, showed that market returns could in fact be predicted at longer time horizons. He also reckoned people are prone to certain behavioural tics, misjudgments that depart from rationality and which can drive markets to heights of ‘irrational exuberance.’ He was also awarded the Nobel prize, jointly with Mr Fama. Other economists have investigated ways in which markets can overshoot in one direction or another. “There are idiots,” Larry Summers once wrote in a paper on the subject. “Look around.”•

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“With About One Million Properties To Choose From, Airbnb Now Far Exceeds The Biggest Hotel Groups”

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

Airbnb doesn’t have to be a scorched-earth part of the Peer Economy à la Uber. With hotel rooms often in short supply in many cities, especially in peak-travel seasons, the company could be a nice complement. That hasn’t been the case so far, however, in New York, a city in which the majority of the rentals are reportedly illegal, large-scale landlords keeping their properties off the rental market, going with Airbnb instead, artificially inflating the cost of available apartments. Such practices serve landlords and travelers at the expense of actual New Yorkers. Time will tell if the service can grow beyond these infractions. From an interview with Brian Chesky, the company’s chief, by Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times:

“Part of Airbnb’s appeal is that each property is different; a backlash against mass production is core to its appeal when compared to that of traditional identikit chain hotels. It can also be considerably cheaper: typically half as much for a private room on Airbnb as one in a hotel, according to one study last year by Priceonomics. Yet it is not just price-sensitive travellers who are switching from hotels to Airbnb: luxury properties are also available, including a Las Vegas penthouse for $1,900 a night, a $1,669 18th-century Umbrian hilltop villa and a 1,000-acre farm in Brazil, with six bedrooms, costing $3,778 a night. With about one million properties to choose from, Airbnb now far exceeds the biggest hotel groups; InterContinental Hotels (IHG), the world’s largest by volume, has close to 700,000 rooms.

Along with Uber, the driver-hailing app, Airbnb is at the forefront of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ — a catch-all term for the growing collection of businesses that are providing additional liquidity to traditional markets by making use of underused assets (Uber for cars, Airbnb for homes).

Airbnb hosts can face problems, such as damages to their property, which led to the company introducing a $1m insurance policy per home after a particularly notorious incident in 2011. Other hosts have returned to find their homes used for sex parties. The company has, though, persuaded millions of consumers that — thanks to its community rating system and identity verification — they can trust Airbnb and each other. However, convincing lawmakers that its short-term leasing service is entirely legal has been a tougher challenge.

The most high-profile case involving regulation has been in New York, one of Airbnb’s biggest markets, where a campaign by Eric Schneiderman, the city’s attorney-general, against short-term letting websites led to a deal when the company handed over details of thousands of listings that the authorities claimed were operating illegally and failing to pay appropriate taxes.”

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A Brief Note From 1952 About A Risky Operation

December 26, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 19, 1952 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Pittsburgh — Millard F. Wright, 42, was back in jail today, convinced that a delicate brain operation has not cured his ‘urge to steal.’

The former Leechburg, Pa., resident, who risked his life in 1949 so the operation could be performed, was arrested last night and held in connection with a string of jewelry store burglaries.”

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