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“I Think My Favorite Scene Was Where I’m Dismantling HAL’s Brain”

November 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

As long as there are movies, I think we’ll watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which boldly aimed to journey beyond the stars, to second-guess the future, and remarkably pulled it all off. Keir Dullea, the actor who portrayed astronaut Dave Bowman, just did a HAL-centric AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What is something people misunderstand or misinterpret about Kubrick?

Keir Dullea:

I’m often asked: Was Kubrick a task master? The answer is no; anything but. He never raised his voice, he had a quiet droll sense of humor and was a man with great curiosity.

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Question:

What preparation or research did you do before filming 2001? Did Kubrick give you any insight into how the character should be portrayed, or did he give you freedom to explore that?

Keir Dullea:

Not a lot. Don’t forget, Arthur C. Clarke, who, aside from being the great writer that he was, was a scientist in his own right and was able to portray the future in such a specific way that the script in itself gave us everything we needed.

The only suggestion Kubrick gave overall was that he did not want us to portrayal scientists in the way they had been portrayed in grade B science fiction movies of the past, that is, men with goatees and outlandish clothes, speaking in some kind of pseudo babble.

One of the definitions I think of a great director is that they cast greatly. If you cast very well, and Stanley being the genius that he was did that in all his films, you don’t need to do a lot of direction, just give the actors the relaxation and space that they need and they will come through.

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Question:

What was your favorite scene you participated in?

Keir Dullea:

I think my favorite scene was where I’m dismantling HAL’s brain. It reminded me a bit of a famous movie and also play called Of Mice and Men when Lenny is speaking with George regarding their plans to start a farm. This is a scene that comes at the end of the film after Lenny has indadvertedly caused the death of a young woman. Now there’s a posse that is looking for him intending possibly to string him up. This discussion of their plans to start a farm has been heard throughout the film, and so with some love and compassion, with a hidden pistol behind his back George reviews their plans with Lenny and half-way through their discussion he shoots him behind his back to avoid him being killed by a posse of men. In some way, emotionally, that scene from Of Mice and Men affected the way I played the scene with HAL.

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Question:

Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist. Do you have any interesting anecdotes about that?

Keir Dullea:

On the first day of shooting, Stanley noticed my shoes and felt they weren’t right. We stopped shooting for the rest of the day until they found the right pair. Let’s face it, feet don’t play a huge role in films.

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Question:

What is your favorite sci-fi movie?

Keir Dullea:

2001: A Space Odyssey.

Question:

APART FROM 2001 … what is your favorite sci-fi movie?

Do you enjoy the genre apart from being one of its greatest exponents?

Keir Dullea:

Yes, I enjoy sci-fi and Blade Runner is my other favorite of the genre.•

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“Out here among the stars lies the destiny of mankind”:

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“No One Can Say Whether It Is A World Like Ours, With Oceans And Life, Cities And Single-Malt Scotch”

November 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A couple of days ago, I posted an excerpt from Five Billion Years of Solitude, the first book by science journalist and exoplanet enthusiast Lee Billings. In “War of the Worlds,” his new Wired piece, the writer details the internecine struggle between two groups of astronomers to lay claim to the discovery of the very first Earth-esque planet beyond our solar system (a topic also covered in Solitude). The opening:

“NO ONE KNOWS what the planet Gliese 667Cc looks like. We know that it is about 22 light-years from Earth, a journey of lifetimes upon lifetimes. But no one can say whether it is a world like ours, with oceans and life, cities and single-malt Scotch. Only a hint of a to-and-fro oscillation in the star it orbits, detectable by Earth’s most sensitive telescopes and spectrographs, lets astronomers say the planet exists at all. The planet is bigger than our world, perhaps made of rocks instead of gas, and within its star’s ‘habitable zone’—at a Goldilocks distance that ensures enough starlight to make liquid water possible but not so much as to nuke the planet clean.

That’s enough to fill the scientists who hunt for worlds outside our own solar system—so-called exoplanets—with wonder. Gliese 667Cc is, if not a sibling to our world, at least a cousin out there amid the stars. No one knows if it is a place we humans could someday live, breathe, and watch triple sunsets. No one knows whether barely imagined natives are right now pointing their most sensitive and far-seeing technology at Earth, wondering the same things. Yet regardless, to be the person who found Gliese 667Cc is to be the person who changes the quest for life beyond our world, to be remembered as long as humans exist to remember—by the light of the sun or a distant, unknown star.

Which is a problem. Because another thing no one knows about Gliese 667Cc is who should get credit for discovering it.”

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“This Was The System, Which Worked Something Like A Collaboration Between Rube Goldberg And Wernher von Braun”

November 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The computer revolution was not the residue of phreaked phones but of gronked trains. From a Medium post by Steven Levy, the preeminent tech journalist of the personal-computing age, an excerpt about MIT’s 1950s-era Tech Model Railroad Club:

“Peter Samson had been a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club since his first week at MIT in the fall of 1958. The first event that entering MIT freshmen attended was a traditional welcoming lecture, the same one that had been given for as long as anyone at MIT could remember. LOOK AT THE PERSON TO YOUR LEFT . . . LOOK AT THE PERSON TO YOUR RIGHT . . . ONE OF YOU THREE WILL NOT GRADUATE FROM THE INSTITUTE. The intended effect of the speech was to create that horrid feeling in the back of the collective freshman throat that signaled unprecedented dread. All their lives, these freshmen had been almost exempt from academic pressure. The exemption had been earned by virtue of brilliance. Now each of them had a person to the right and a person to the left who was just as smart. Maybe even smarter.

There were enough obstacles to learning already—why bother with stupid things like brown-nosing teachers and striving for grades? To students like Peter Samson, the quest meant more than the degree.

Sometime after the lecture came Freshman Midway. All the campus organizations—special-interest groups, fraternities, and such— set up booths in a large gymnasium to try to recruit new members. The group that snagged Peter was the Tech Model Railroad Club. Its members, bright-eyed and crew-cutted upperclassmen who spoke with the spasmodic cadences of people who want words out of the way in a hurry, boasted a spectacular display of HO gauge trains they had in a permanent clubroom in Building 20. Peter Samson had long been fascinated by trains, especially subways. So he went along on the walking tour to the building, a shingle-clad temporary structure built during World War II. The hallways were cavernous, and even though the clubroom was on the second floor it had the dank, dimly lit feel of a basement.

The clubroom was dominated by the huge train layout. It just about filled the room, and if you stood in the little control area called ‘the notch’ you could see a little town, a little industrial area, a tiny working trolley line, a papier-mache mountain, and of course a lot of trains and tracks. The trains were meticulously crafted to resemble their full-scale counterparts, and they chugged along the twists and turns of track with picture-book perfection. And then Peter Samson looked underneath the chest-high boards which held the layout. It took his breath away. Underneath this layout was a more massive matrix of wires and relays and crossbar switches than Peter Samson had ever dreamed existed. There were neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires—twisting and twirling like a rainbow-colored explosion of Einstein’s hair. It was an incredibly complicated system, and Peter Samson vowed to find out how it worked.

There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Wernher von Braun, and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes ‘gronked’—in club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use.”

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“So What Happens When They Start To Disappear?”

November 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Foxconn is investing massively in one million robots, hoping to remove from its factories much of the pesky human element, that thing which has caused it so much consternation, and other corporations which have relied on cheap Asian labor are following suit. What are the ramifications for the individual laborer and the global economy? From Sam Becker at Business Cheat Sheet:

“You can’t really blame companies like Nike or Foxconn for what they’re doing — after all, they’re businesses, and their job is to turn a profit for shareholders and the company’s owners. That’s why they exist. They do not exist to supply jobs. However, the jobs that big companies like these do add to the economy are immensely important to the integrity of society as a whole.

So what happens when they start to disappear? Obviously, these disappearing positions will have a giant economic effect on developing nations, particularly countries that have been used for cheap labor over the past few decades. Many of the world’s struggling nations that depend on large influxes of capital investment and jobs from American and European companies are going to face some tough situations as automation continues to spread, as they have built their economic backbone as popular choices for companies looking to outsource.

It looks like the other shoe is about to drop, and they will now experience the same situation many Americans were faced with a decade or two before them. The question is, what will the ultimate fallout from that be? We’re talking about the possibility of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of workers losing their jobs over the next two decades, if things continue to pick up.

While we have always heard of a future in which robots would be handling most of the labor, it’s hard to think that most people pictured it in the way that things seem to be heading. Sure, automated work forces will be handling many of the world’s tasks in a relatively short amount of time, ushering in a new era of prosperity and leisure for the masses. The problem is that that prosperity hasn’t been shared, and many of the world’s poor and middle classes will end up scrambling to make ends meet as a result.

It’s unclear what the endgame of this dramatic shift from human labor to automation will be, but it’s clear that we are in the early stages of it. What policymakers and economists will need to do is to figure out how the vast majority of the planet’s masses will care for themselves if there is suddenly a huge shortage of work and opportunity.“

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“Are There Existential Threats To The Strand?”

November 25, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Via the wonderful Browser, I came across a very fine online piece by Christopher Bonanos of New York about the Strand, the only bookstore in NYC I still go to, the only one that doesn’t depress me. It’s as vibrant as ever, anachronism though it is. Amusingly, I purchased Bonanos’ own book, Instant: The Story of Polaroid, at the Strand last year. (Second floor, photography section.) An excerpt about the perils the brick-and-mortar bookseller must circumvent to continue thriving:

“Are there existential threats to the Strand? There are. E-books, which require no retail space, have cut into best-seller sales. The Strand has pushed back with remaindered hardcovers, placed by the front door under a sign reading LOWER-PRICED THAN E-BOOKS.

There’s also the Strand’s relationship with its unionized employees, who were organized by the UAW back in the ’70s. They just signed a new contract this past month. Mostly, the labor-management situation seems equable; still, every few years, when contract time comes, someone writes a news story about strife. ‘The union demands something up here,’ says Fred [Bass], gesturing, ‘and we’re down here … There’s always going to be conflict.’ In general, the union is quite aware that the Strand is not Google, and the Basses are perfectly aware that relative harmony benefits the business. In October, a pro-union staffer named Greg Farrell published a graphic-novel-style book critical of both management and the union’s representatives. Oddly, he still works at the store. More oddly, the Strand sells the book.

Internet used-book sales, too, would seem to be a long-term concern. When you visit Amazon or AbeBooks (which is owned by Amazon) and search for an out-of-print title, your results are usually listed from cheapest to most expensive. The first ‘store’ on the list often turns out to be a barn full of books in rural Minnesota or Vermont. Some are charity stores, selling donated books—no acquisition costs at all. They certainly aren’t paying Manhattan overhead. Yet here, too, the Strand is holding on, owing mostly to that churning turnover and the quality of its stock. That barn isn’t going to have many of last year’s $75 art books for $40, and the Strand always does. Plus there are the only–in–New York surprises that come through the store’s front door. Opening a box can reveal a Warhol monograph that will sell for more than $1,000, or an editor’s library full of warm inscriptions from authors.

If that’s the future, could the Strand wind up virtual? Surely operating out of one of those barns would be cheaper. ‘Not with our formula,’ says Bass firmly. ‘We need the store. This business requires a lot of cash flow to operate,’ and much of it comes in with the tourists. That funds the book-buying, which supplies the next cycle of inventory.”

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“Uber Owns Almost No Physical Infrastructure And Has An Unremarkable App”

November 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his WSJ column about Silicon Valley’s newest wave, Christopher Mims points out something I mentioned in an earlier post: Uber’s trollish tactics with journalists and competitors is nothing new in Silicon Valley. That doesn’t make it less disturbing but provides context. Another thing Mims wisely asserts is that Uber is incentivized to play rough because there’s nothing remarkable about its intellectual property. An excerpt:

“Uber owns almost no physical infrastructure and has an unremarkable app that is little different from those of a half dozen competitors. And yet it might soon reach $10 billion a year in revenue, according to a slide deck recently published by Business Insider in what feels like a successful attempt to change the subject.

Internal documents from Uber published by Business Insider, and later confirmed to Business Insider by Uber, outline the company’s criteria for hiring. They include traits like ‘fierceness,’ which Uber defines as ‘do whatever it takes to make Uber a success.’

Here’s what it takes to make Uber a success, apparently: Enter new markets without asking regulators for permission, then build enough of a customer base to make classifying the service as a traditional taxi company politically expensive for regulators. Tell investors who want to put their money in the company that they are banned from investing in its competitors. Aggressively recruit drivers from competitors, while also interfering with those drivers’ ability to make a living by ordering and canceling rides. Collect information on all Uber rides and users in a ‘God View’ dashboard that is accessible to Uber’s salaried employees and was, at least until last year, displayed by Uber’s marketing staff at launch parties.

Yet Uber is thriving.”

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“Uber Promises A Good Job, But In Reality It’s A Very Precarious Way To Make A Living”

November 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Consumers love Uber, and the rideshare company has things to recommend it: convenient smartphone “hailing,” cashless payments, etc. But as is the case with Walmart, what’s good for the consumer is not so for the worker. There are hidden costs. Travis Kalanick’s outfit scorches the earth and then marginalizes the labor–even hopes to eliminate it altogether. And as society becomes more and more automated, many of us will end up living on those margins, at least in the short and medium term. In a sense, we’re all Uber drivers now. From Avi Asher-Schapiro at Verge, a story about Uber ostensibly offering to help unemployed veterans move into a new field, which will essentially just shuffle them from one kind of tenuousness into another, all for good public relations. An excerpt:

“Launched this September by the international car service giant Uber, UberMILITARY aims to hire 50,000 vets — nearly a quarter of currently unemployed Iraq and Afghanistan War soldiers — in the next 18 months. (Though that number seems ambitious, the company claims to hire 50,000 drivers every month.)

To aid in its effort, Uber has enlisted respected armed forces commanders such as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, and former general Stanley A. McChrystal as volunteer ambassadors to the veteran community.

Gates has called the initiative an ‘unprecedented effort… to ensure that tens of thousands of our nation’s military members, veterans, and spouses have access to a unique entrepreneurial opportunity.’

But veterans currently driving for Uber are concerned that military commanders are sending vets like Malik into low-wage and unstable employment.

As one army machine gunner turned Los Angeles Uber driver put it, ‘Uber promises a good job, but in reality it’s a very precarious way to make a living. I’m looking for a new job, and there’s no way I would recommend this life to other vets.“

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“I Don’t Think We’ll Ever Colonize Other Stars”

November 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In his excellent book about exoplanets, Five Billion Years of Solitude, Lee Billings speaks with astronomer Frank Drake about the scientist’s attempts at sending messages, via radio signals, to other technological civilizations out there, something he’s been working on since 1960, thinking this sort of contact more likely than an interstellar meet and greet. In one passage, Drake explains why he believes it likely humans will die along with the sun. An excerpt:

“Some techno-prophets spoke worshipfully or fearfully of computers becoming sentient and gaining godlike powers. Others speculated that someday humans would break free of their carbon-based chains by uploading their minds into silicon substrates, where they could, in some manner, live forever. All seemed to agree that if humans themselves weren’t destined to inherit the Earth, they would certainly author whatever ultimately would. A few even conjured up the bygone Space Age dreams of Drake’s youth, envisioning a new golden era of prosperity and exploration in which humans would travel with their intelligent machines throughout the solar system, and perhaps someday to other stars.

‘Yeah, I’ve heard all that stuff,’ Drake replied. ‘It would be nice if we made it to Mars. But I don’t hold with the hypothesis that we’ll all slowly become or be replaced by computers. And of all the things we might someday do, I don’t think we’ll ever colonize other stars.’

I asked why not.

‘I don’t think computers can have fun,’ he said. ‘I think joy is a quality not available to computers. But what do I know?’ He laughed. ‘Interstellar travel, on the other hand, I’ve worked on that quite a bit. Putting a hundred humans around a nearby star costs about a million times as much as putting them in orbit in your own system. You’d have to be pretty rich to pull that off. 

‘Let’s say you have two colonies ten light-years apart–that’s probably the typical distance between habitable planets, I’d guess. The fact is, you can’t really go faster than about a tenth of light-speed. At speeds higher than that, if you hit anything of any substance whatsoever, the amount of energy released approaches that of a nuclear bomb. So you’re limited to about ten percent, a speed we can’t currently come anywhere close to, and that means your looking at journey times of at least a hundred years. The distances, times, and speeds are daunting, but the most daunting thing of all is the cost. Take something the size of a Boeing 737 plane, which is about the smallest that might make a reasonable crewed expedition, and send it at a tenth the speed of light to a nearby star, okay? Now just work out the kinetic energy that’s in it. It turns out to be about equal to two hundred years of the total electric power production in today’s United States. And that’s assuming a one-way trip, where you don’t even slow down and enter orbit on the other end. The inherent difficulty of interstellar travel is one of the big reasons why looking for things like radio signals is so appealing.’

‘So you think we’re stuck in the solar sytem,’ I said, thinking of distant days when the swollen red sun would sterilize Earth. ‘This is it?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Drake somberly replied. ‘You have to admit, though, that it’s pretty good while it lasts.'”

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“‘We Found That We Actually Need To Be — Not Aggressive — But Assertive’ With The Vehicles”

November 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The default mode for Google driverless cars currently is yield, shutting down in the presence of any unusual aggression, but that’s not realistic in the long run. How can the autonomous vehicles “gain confidence” without sacrificing safety? From Steve Johnson at the Seattle Times:

“In 700,000 miles of navigating roads, Google’s self-driving cars have encountered just about everything — including an older woman in a motorized wheelchair flailing a broom at a duck she was chasing around the street.

Apparently perplexed and taking no chances, the vehicle stopped and refused to go farther.

Through extensive testing covering nearly every street in Mountain View, the company’s 20 or so autonomous vehicles have developed an abiding sense of caution. But Google researchers concede it will take more experience on the roads before the autos can learn to cope with every situation without becoming bewildered and shutting down, stranding passengers. When that happens now, researchers have to take the wheel and step on the gas.

One of the most surprising lessons: While hoping to make cars that are safer than those driven by people, Google has discovered its smart machines need to act a little human, especially when dealing with pushy motorists.

‘We found that we actually need to be — not aggressive — but assertive’ with the vehicles, said Nathaniel Fairfield, technical leader of a team that writes software fixes for problems uncovered during the driving tests.”

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“Man Was Nothing More Than A Model, A Technique. It Is Necessary To Construct A New Model.”

November 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

John Brockman, the singular force behind the online journal of scientific avant-garde, Edge, which has offered up morsels of genius like this one, has republished a Spiegel profile of himself. An excerpt:

“He is charming, without hiding his own interests. He is proud of his life, his intelligence, without that he would have to apologize for it. He is a key figure of the late 20th and early 21st century, the éminence grise and major source of inspiration for the globally dominant culture, which he himself named as the “third culture”.

It is not Brockman, but his authors, who are well-known: Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman. Physicists, neuroscientists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, fixed stars of the science age, superstars of nonfiction bestseller lists, the reason for Brockman’s financial success and good mood.

‘These are all old friends,’ he says.

‘I’ve been their agent for decades. It’s a wonderful life: I’m doing what I love to do, I read smart books and get well-paid for it.’

The new works of his authors are next to each other in the conference room of the agency. Brockman, 73, operates out of a spacious whole floor on Fifth Avenue in New York with glass office walls and a view of the famous Flatiron Building.

These books deal with the big questions: What is man? What is the brain? What is free will? What is intelligence? And what happens when machines become smarter than humans?

Brockman likes the big issues, everything else is small talk to him.

‘Man was nothing more than a model, a technique. It is necessary to construct a new model”, he writes in his book Afterwords. ‘The human delusion lies in the belief that the human being is the basis of reality and the final goal of the evolution.’

The book first appeared in 1969 under the ingenious title By the Late John Brockman and begins with the programmatic sentence: ‘Man is dead.’

It is a small masterpiece of clear-thinking, a youthful outcry. Brockman was not even 30 at the time.

The book is aggressive, curious and prophetic and strips away the humanism of the literary mind with a Ludwig-Wittgenstein-like toughness: ‘The concept of freedom,’ he writes, ‘is simply absurd.’

The book made him briefly known, then it was forgotten. It was too early, too radical, nobody wanted to say goodbye to humans, at least not in the literary milieu.

And now with the book published in German for the first time as Afterwords, you realize that you recognize or understand some revolutions only in retrospect 30 or 40 years later.“

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“Siri Isn’t Very Flexible And Still Makes Lots Of Mistakes…But Siri Is Embryonic”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Laptop computers were just a fad–a disappointment–and they were going away. Except they didn’t, they thrived, until even smaller, more-powerful screens began to supplant them. AI has likewise often failed to live up to its billing, a dream deferred, although now it might be starting to come true, as even Weak AI has proved powerful. From Jason Dorrier at the Singularity Hub:

“[Singularity University’s Neil] Jacobstein said Watson and programs like it don’t demonstrate intelligence that is ‘broad, deep, and subtle’ like human intelligence, but they are a multi-billion dollar fulcrum to augment a human brain faced with zettabytes of data.

Our brains, beautiful and capable as they are, have major limitations that machines simply don’t share—speed, memory, bandwidth, and biases. ‘The human brain hasn’t had a major upgrade in over 50,000 years,’ Jacobstein said.

Now, we’re a few steps away from having computer assistants that communicate like we do on the surface—speaking and understanding plain english—even as they manage, sift, and analyze huge chunks of data in the background.

Siri isn’t very flexible and still makes lots of mistakes, often humorous ones—but Siri is embryonic. Jacobstein thinks we’ll see much more advanced versions soon. In fact, with $10 million in funding, SIRI’s inventors are already working on a sequel.

And increasingly, we’re turning to the brain for inspiration.”

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“Autonomous Cars Will Also Have A Number Of Nonlinear Effects”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ridesharing will have a more profound effect on the economy in the near future than driverless cars simply because the former is doable (and being done) right now, though at some point the two will likely merge. That will cause residual effects beyond fewer crashes. From Michael Walker at the Hollywood Reporter:

“Mark Platshon, managing director of Icebreaker Ventures and a consultant to BMW’s iDivision, which manufactures electric and plug-in hybrid cars, has ridden in the Google driverless cars. ‘They can merge onto rush hour traffic on the 101 and go through a construction site,’ Platshon told the Hollywood Reporter. ‘It’s very doable.’

Autonomous cars will also have a number of nonlinear effects with impacts on categories as diverse as affordable housing and healthcare, Platshon said. ‘If we get autonomous cars, we don’t have 33,000 fatalities, 2,500,000 ER visits and $18 billion per year in costs. Take that burden off of every hospital and you’ve fixed the health care problem.’

Platshon cited the example of an acquaintance in San Francisco who had decided to not buy a car, use Uber for transportation and convert his garage to a student apartment. There are tens of thousands of garages in the U.S. that could be converted to affordable housing if people relied on car services like Uber or, in the future, autonomous vehicles that could be summoned by smart phone, Platshon said. ‘American drivers pay $200 billion a year for car insurance. We could give back $1,000 per person as discretionary spending.”

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“Cardin Has Been Known To Go On Work Binges, Wearing The Same Suit And Tie For Several Days”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The space-age period of Pierre Cardin the 1960s and early 1970s was one of the greatest bursts of creativity anyone has ever enjoyed. It still seems to me a step ahead of anything Hollywood wardrobe departments are doing today. In 1976, when he was 54 years old and the master of not a fashion house but an empire, the designer was profiled in People by Pamela Andriotakis. The opening:

“‘In the beginning, they always criticize me,’ Pierre Cardin says gleefully. ‘They say, ‘What is he doing now? Quel horreur? Quel décadence. That’s the end of Cardin.’ Then, six months later, they’re all doing it.’

The 54-year-old Frenchman is more right than humble. Not only did his flamboyant men’s clothes lead to the ‘Peacock Revolution’ of the 1960s and his ready-to-wear designer fashions for women lower the brows of haute couture, he also has inspired many of his fellow couturiers to venture into entrepreneurial areas far removed from clothing.

Few, however, have extended themselves as much as Cardin, whose $100-million-a-year operation is responsible for, among other things, Cardin towels, Cardin stereo sets, Cardin kitchens, Cardin glassware, Cardin bicycles, Cardin carpets, Cardin lamps, Cardin ashtrays, Cardin wallpaper, Cardin wines and Cardin chocolates.

‘The next thing you know he’ll be designing cheese,’ huffed an executive at archcompetitor Yves St. Laurent. ‘Cardin is no longer a label,’ exults Cardin himself. ‘It is a trademark.’

The trademark is used by 280 factories with 60,000 employees, located in 51 countries on six continents. Only Antarctica has thus far escaped the impact of what the French have come to call Cardinization. (And no one is betting against the likelihood of a Cardin penguin leash.)

While most of the Cardin products are manufactured under licensing arrangements, Cardin is more than just the man behind the scene. He is all over the scene. On a typical day he leaves his Paris townhouse after breakfast—assuming he remembers to have breakfast—and walks to his office at 59 Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, the Right Bank street of exclusive shops. There are morning meetings with directors of his foreign companies, followed by briefer consultations with textile makers and other suppliers, many of whom fly to Paris from all over Europe just to aim a 15-minute sales pitch at Cardin.

Between appointments, Cardin may lope upstairs to his fashion workroom to tinker with a detail on a garment from a forthcoming line. Cardin claims responsibility for all original designs, which are then executed by subordinates under his watchful eye. Cardin has also maintained his presence at formal showings—the latest one, his spring-summer line, was unleashed four months ago in Paris—even though his ready-to-wear business is the most profitable sector of his empire. ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘we lose money on haute couture. But it is a great laboratory for ideas.’

In the sparsely furnished, white-walled workroom, he gives brief audiences to employees with questions or suggestions, talking little but gesturing with Mediterranean expansiveness. When a supervisor approached him to pass on an employee’s request for a raise, Cardin said crisply, ‘Give it to him. He has worked for me for many years.” Another employee says, ‘You have to have a sixth sense to work for him. It is very tiring. But he is the best school in the world.’

After perhaps 15 meetings, it is time for lunch, which he often eats on a plane bound for the South of France, England or Italy en route to visiting a factory. He may be back in his offices by late afternoon, checking stocks in his three nearby boutiques, going over the books, rearranging furniture or even, with a kind of frenetic energy, sweeping up a messy room.

In especially busy times Cardin has been known to go on work binges, wearing the same suit and tie for several days, neglecting to shave and generally becoming a less than persuasive advertisement for the Cardin look. When less pressed, Cardin often spends the evening at his version of Xanadu, l’Espace (‘Space’), a combination theater and exhibition hall which he opened in December 1970. 

Cardin recently turned l’Espace into a Sarah Bernhardt museum. He has also used it to introduce new painters, sculptors and playwrights as well as to present such established performers as Ella Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich and Dionne Warwicke. He is said to lose $300,000 a year on I’Espace but is more than compensated in personal enjoyment—not to mention good public relations. The couturier André Courrèges, who admires the way Cardin operates, says, ‘He does it because it is his mistress.'”

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“We Barely Even Know What The Human Brain Does”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Wall Street Journal interview conducted by Gillian Wong, Andrew Ng, formerly of Google and now the head of AI research for Baidu, tries to cool down the hype of two hot tech sectors, driverless cars and deep learning. An excerpt:

WSJ:

What about the self-driving car project? We know Baidu has partnered with BMW on that.

Andrew Ng:

That’s another research exploration. Building self-driving cars is really hard. I think making it achieve high levels of safety is challenging. It’s a relatively early project. Building something that is safe enough to drive hundreds of thousands of miles, including roads that you haven’t seen before, roads that you don’t have a map of, roads where someone might have started to do construction just 10 minutes ago, that is hard. …

WSJ:

Who’s at the forefront of deep learning?

Andrew Ng:

There are a lot of deep-learning startups. Unfortunately, deep learning is so hot today that there are startups that call themselves deep learning using a somewhat generous interpretation. It’s creating tons of value for users and for companies, but there’s also a lot of hype. We tend to say deep learning is loosely a simulation of the brain. That sound bite is so easy for all of us to use that it sometimes causes people to over-extrapolate to what deep learning is. The reality is it’s really very different than the brain. We barely (even) know what the human brain does.•

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“Everyone Goes To The Airport, Everyone Has Trouble Parking”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Here’s a new twist in the Peer Economy I don’t think will work, especially as ridesharing becomes more popular: You don’t have to pay for parking at the airport (and you’ll receive other amenities) if you allow your car to be rented while you’re out of town. From Lori Aratani at the Washington Post:

“A San Francisco-based company is putting yet another spin on the Washington area’s sharing economy, giving travelers flying out of Dulles International Airport free parking and a car wash in exchange for permission to rent their cars to other drivers.

FlightCar launches Wednesday at Dulles and two other U.S. airports. Participating travelers can drop off their cars at a designated lot near Dulles. In exchange for letting FlightCar offer a vehicle for rent, the travelers receive free parking, a Town Car ride to the airport, a car wash and per-mile payment if the vehicle is rented — to a pre-screened driver — while they’re away.

‘Everyone goes to the airport, everyone has trouble parking, so it just make sense,’ said Kevin Petrovic, president and co-founder of FlightCar.”

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“Automation’s New Wave Is Hitting Just About Everyone”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love reading Nicholas Carr, so bright he is and such a blessedly lucid writer, though I don’t always find myself agreeing with him. I won’t blame him for the headline of his latest WSJ piece, “Automation Makes Us Dumb,” but I do take issue with his idea that we should be alarmed that AI is causing “skill fade” in airline pilots, making it dangerous to fly. It’s no less scary for a plane to crash by human hand rather than because of a computer failure (or because of some combined failure of the two). It’s bad regardless. But accidents on domestic airlines in America have become almost non-existent as the crafts have become more computerized and we’ve learned to navigate wind shears. That wouldn’t be the case without machines aiding planes, which are, you know, machines. I think Carr’s enthusiasm for “adaptive automation” makes sense, at least in the short and medium terms, though ultimately I favor whatever most often prevents plane noses from touching earth. From Carr:

“In the 1950s, a Harvard Business School professor named James Bright went into the field to study automation’s actual effects on a variety of industries, from heavy manufacturing to oil refining to bread baking. Factory conditions, he discovered, were anything but uplifting. More often than not, the new machines were leaving workers with drabber, less demanding jobs. An automated milling machine, for example, didn’t transform the metalworker into a more creative artisan; it turned him into a pusher of buttons.

Bright concluded that the overriding effect of automation was (in the jargon of labor economists) to ‘de-skill’ workers rather than to ‘up-skill’ them. ‘The lesson should be increasingly clear,’ he wrote in 1966. ‘Highly complex equipment’ did not require ‘skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be built into the machine.’

We are learning that lesson again today on a much broader scale. As software has become capable of analysis and decision-making, automation has leapt out of the factory and into the white-collar world. Computers are taking over the kinds of knowledge work long considered the preserve of well-educated, well-trained professionals: Pilots rely on computers to fly planes; doctors consult them in diagnosing ailments; architects use them to design buildings. Automation’s new wave is hitting just about everyone.”

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“Passengers Of The Future May Well View Vehicles As Just Another Form Of Public Transportation”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The idea that we have passed peak-car in America has been circling the block for a few years, that we would simply purchase miles the way we do minutes. While the Sharing Economy is part of the shift, the transformation won’t be complete until autonomous vehicles are perfected, and the final five-to-ten percent of that process isn’t easy. From Jerry Hirsch at the Los Angeles Times:

“Personal transportation is on the cusp of its greatest transformation since the advent of the internal combustion engine.

With the rise of self-driving vehicles, ride-sharing, traffic congestion and environmental regulation, we may not even own cars in the future, much less drive them.

A glimpse of the coming revolution can be seen in the models debuting this week at the Los Angeles Auto Show. Hidden under their hoods and dashboards are sensors that take the first steps toward autonomous driving. Already, cars can park themselves, slam on the brakes to avoid crashes and adjust steering to stay centered in a lane.

But the disruption will go well beyond who is — or isn’t — at the controls. For a century, cars have been symbols of freedom and status. Passengers of the future may well view vehicles as just another form of public transportation, to be purchased by the trip or in a subscription. Buying sexy, fast cars for garages could evolve into buying seat-miles in appliance-like pods, piloted by robots, parked in public stalls.”

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Old Print Article: “Plans Airports Within Cities,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

November 20, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It sounds odd, but it seemed to some in the Roaring Twenties that the best way to get to the airport was by plane. In an article in the February 19, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an engineer predicted that soon city dwellers would be able order up small planes that could take off from or land on midtown buildings which had been retrofitted as small airports, saving themselves from the veritable tortoise-like transport of trains and taxis.

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“Asuna Would Make A Good Date”

November 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Apart from yikes!, I’m sort of out of words when it comes to Asuna, the tween robot created by Japanese inventor Hiroshi Ishiguro, which tries to exit the uncanny valley at the far end. Currently controlled remotely, an autonomous version is, of course, in the works. From Maria Khan at IBT:

“Life-like robots are taking Japan by storm and will soon be seen as actresses and even used as clones of the deceased.

‘Earlier this month, Robotics Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro showcased his latest creation, Android ‘Asuna’ at the Tokyo Designers’ Week.

Dubbed a ‘geminoid’, Asuna was well-liked by the visitors at the show, who said the robot was very human-like and had a nice voice.

‘[Asuna] would make a good date; a cheap date!’ said one man.

Most of the visitors remarked ‘sukoi’ meaning ‘amazing’ upon seeing Asuna, due to her human-like skin and facial expressions.

Some visitors, assuming Asuna was just another human, respectfully bowed before her requesting a selfie with her.“

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“This Could Be A Tax Gift That Keeps On Giving”

November 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Income inequality may not end up being the primary economic challenge of these automated times, but it certainly is a glaring symptom of a lot of problems. From Suzanne McGee at the Guardian:

“Which would you think would be larger for Ford Motor, a company that last year reported revenues of $139.4b: the taxes it pays the US federal government or the compensation it pays its CEO?

If you picked option B, congratulations – you may be cynical, but you’re right. Alan Mulally, Ford’s CEO, pocketed a compensation package that totaled $23.2m while Ford itself got a US federal tax refund of $19m.

And Ford isn’t the only company to pay its CEO more than it forked over to Uncle Sam.

Seven of the country’s 30 largest corporations paid more to their CEOs than they did in taxes last year, according to a just-released study by the Center for Effective Government and the Institute for Policy Studies.

At the same time, Citigroup qualified for a $260m tax refund from the IRS, thanks to a special waiverthat enabled it to capture the full tax benefits of buying unprofitable businesses. This could be a tax gift that keeps on giving, as the bank has been on a tear to keep earning more to take full advantage of the provision.

The rift between tax burden and executive pay for big companies is ‘getting worse,’ says Scott Klinger, director of revenue and spending policies at the Center for Effective Government.”

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“It Wasn’t Until 1904 That The Broader Public Got A Whiff Of The Curse”

November 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The American overreaction to Ebola, a real epidemic in Liberia but not here, probably has more to do with unstated anxieties than spoken ones. We’re in a globalized world now, on the cusp of a post-white country, in a time of technology and terrorism, invaders everywhere. Close the airports, strengthen the borders, quarantine the threats. 

People have always tried to place a name to their fears, even if it was the wrong one. If you go back 100 to 150 years, life was commonly brutal and brief. Famine and disease and war were seemingly everywhere and knew no solution, treatment or permanent treaty. Anarchy was fashionable, science terrifying (“What hath God wrought!“), fascism about to rise and revolution in the air. The world seemed haunted. Even the “unsinkable” Titanic drank itself to death. Could some of that era’s carnage, even the shocking capsizing of that famous British passenger liner, have occurred because we had the temerity to disrupt nature’s order and aroused a mummy’s curse? Of course not, but sometimes the sick are not very circumspect of the diagnosis. From Rose Eveleth’s Nautilus piece “The Curse of the Unlucky Mummy“:

“Sometime in the 1860s, five recent Oxford graduates took a trip to Egypt. Together they sailed down the Nile, a tourist attraction even then. To remember their trip, they bought a souvenir in the mummy pits of Deir el-Bahri—the coffin lid of a priestess of Amen-Ra. The high priests of Amen-Ra, named after an Egyptian deity, were military rulers who commanded southern Egypt in the 21st Dynasty (1085 to 945 B.C.), a time of turmoil and strife. Powerful and prone to keep secrets, the priesthood worked to appease the gods that Egypt had clearly angered. With her wide, baleful eyes, open palms, and outstretched fingers, the priestess on the coffin lid seemed to cast a malevolent allure.

On their way back from Egypt, two of the men died. A third went to Cairo and accidentally shot himself in the arm while quail hunting and had to have it amputated. Another member of the group, Arthur Wheeler, managed to make it back to England, only to lose his entire fortune gambling. He moved to America and lost his new fortune to both a flood and a fire. The coffin lid was then placed under the care of Wheeler’s sister, who attempted to have it photographed in 1887. The photographer died, as did the porter. The man asked to translate the hieroglyphs on the lid committed suicide. The coffin lid seemed almost certainly cursed. But this was only the beginning.

Today, the 5-foot-tall ‘mummy board’ lives in the British Museum, where it’s officially known as ‘artifact 22542.’ The mummified priestess that may have lain beneath it has been lost to eternity. But it has another, more commonly used name: ‘Unlucky Mummy.’ Since its arrival at the museum in 1889, the Unlucky Mummy has been blamed for everything from the sinking of the Titanic to the escalation of World War I. How this piece of wood become so intimately and persistently connected with death and destruction is a story of the endlessly swirling tales that people tell when they are afraid—of change, of politics, of science. It is the kind of story that never dies, only feeds upon itself, updating and morphing and tightening its grip no matter how much light is thrown on it.

By the time the Unlucky Mummy arrived at the British Museum, its reputation had seeped through British private society. While the museum curators generally scoffed at the alleged curse, men at soirees, dinner parties, and ‘ghost clubs,’ traded stories of its powers. But it wasn’t until 1904 that the broader public got a whiff of the curse. That was the year that a young, dashing, and ambitious journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson published a front-page article in the Daily Express, called ‘A Priestess of Death,’ about the allegedly haunted mummy. ‘It is certain that the Egyptians had powers which we in the 20th century may laugh at, yet can never understand,’ he wrote.

Three years later, Robinson died suddenly of a fever, and his friends immediately thought of the mummy’s curse. ‘The very last time I saw him he told me a wonderful tale about a mummy which had caused the death of everybody who had to do with it,’ wrote Archibald Marshall, an English author and journalist.”

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“By 2030, We Should Be Reaching Speeds Between 225 And 250 Miles An Hour, On Average”

November 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Jared Lindzon’s Impact Lab piece which predicts that the average travel speed for human transport by 2030 will be at or near 250mph (I’ll take the under), the author looks at “Re-Programming Mobility,” a report by NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy research scientist Anthony Townsend, which imagines a quartet of extreme traffic scenarios being realized in the next 15 years. An excerpt:

“In his report Townsend takes an in depth look at four possible outcomes in four specific locations, though he says that they’re meant to serve as a representation of the country as a whole. In his report he outlines concerns over government partnerships with private companies, and considers how those agreements could play out over the long haul.

The first scenario takes place in Atlanta, where a near-bankrupt municipal government of the future is unable to afford repairs to its crumbling infrastructure, so it enters a partnership with Google.

‘The idea there is that Google does get to implement its vision of driverless cars, and does so in part with the state government in Georgia,’ said Townsend. ‘You get a whole lot of land use impacts from them, hyper urban sprawl, neighborhoods that aren’t connected to this network and get left behind, and then you get a lot of difficult questions around the role of a single company having so much control over infrastructure.’

The second scenario considers a dystopian future for Los Angeles, where self-driving cars are forced to share the roads with manually driven vehicles, creating unsafe and unpredictable roadways.

‘It’s not a world where we all have these identical perfect pod cars — you have no idea what to expect from other drivers,’ he said. ‘On top of that you’re basically doubling the number of cars, because all of a sudden kids and senior citizens and visually impaired people are going to be buying cars for the first time, so it’s a world of messy transition, and the L.A. region basically becomes unlivable.’

The third scenario takes place in New Jersey, where global warming has caused a series of brutal winters and severe weather patterns, which in turn put a strain on road maintenance. Once the city exhausts its resources, it calls upon the state to help rebuild the transit system.

‘They build a network of high speed, electronically hailed busses and rapid transit,’ said Townsend. ‘So you’ve basically got busses running at 6-inches of separation through the Lincoln Tunnel to make up for the real capacity they never built.’

The fourth and final scenario imagined by Townsend and his team considers the future of transportation in Boston, where smart transit systems and electric bikes help support a city of students living in high-density single-person apartments, while sharing transit routes with freight vehicles leaving the harbor.

‘Most shipping companies can’t keep up with the volume, but you’ve also seen Amazon and Google and EBay getting into same-day delivery, so you can imagine what might happen in the extreme is that they would start forcing all the freight to be delivered at night,’ he said. ‘So the city would be for people during the daytime and robots at night.’”

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“It Prevents The Brain From Learning A City’s Geography”

November 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The weather report for NYC on Google one day last week told me the temperature was “79°” when it was actually 59°. I realized the info was mistaken because of common sense, but machines don’t yet have that quality nor will they likely in the near run. While I’m sure driverless cars and crowd robotics will reduce auto accidents, the system will always have ghosts, and it’s reasonable to ask whether they will put ghosts in our “machines.” It seems a pretty safe bet that our cognition will shift when we offload driving and navigation responsibilities to algorithms, that some abilities will atrophy, even if we come out ahead in the aggregate. From Katia Moskvitch at the BBC:

“Technology wasn’t supposed to work that way. Manufacturers have supported drivers with power steering, cruise control, antilock brakes and electronic stability controls. Then they gave us sophisticated on-board computers that power car entertainment systems and fine-tune our cars’ performance on the go. Today we drive sleek, aerodynamic vehicles with more computing power than early Space Shuttles.

And yet, in many ways, it’s now the technology itself that’s getting in our way. Yes, today’s cars can help us not just to stay in line, keep to the speed limit and maintain the correct distance to the car ahead. However, there’s also a huge drawback: the more we rely on technology, the less we pay attention to what’s happening around our cars.

Lack of learning

Who, for instance, can confidently adjust all the systems of a car without getting lost in confusing menu choices? Or take something as basic as the cruise control: with our foot off the accelerator, how often do we have to make a sharp brake because we forget to disengage the cruise control?

The problem, though, runs deeper than that. A survey commissioned by in 2008 by UK newspaper The Mirror found that 1.5 million motorists have veered suddenly in traffic when following their GPS instructions without taking notice of the cars around them. And about 300,000 drivers have crashed after following instructions from their satnav.

Then there’s the problem of what happens when the tech is taken away. Drivers who use their GPS daily on regular routes are more likely to get lost on days when their electronic guide is left at home, or out of battery. That’s true even if they make this trip many times over several days, because it’s much more difficult for the brain to remember a navigation system’s step-by-by instructions; on the contrary, it prevents the brain from learning a city’s geography.”

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“There’s A Lot Of Ways To Get That Exercise, Get That Reading Muscle Worked On”

November 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I can’t guarantee there will always be Broadway, but I’m sure there will always be theater. I feel the same way about books, even if brick-and-mortar stores are (sadly) in a steep decline. There will permanently be a hunger for written stories. 

Of course, it takes some training to take advantage of the endless supply of volumes now available to us, and James Patterson is concerned that reading is an endangered species. He’s right to question what an Amazon monopoly on book pricing might mean, though I think the money he’s allocating to TV ads encouraging reading might be better spent on simply buying comic books for low-income families with young children. Having grown up in very modest circumstances and having learned to read on Mad magazine, I can vouch for such a plan. Based on his interview with Erin Keane of Salon, Patterson is certainly aware of the power of pleasure reading early in life. An excerpt:

“Question:

What’s the goal here? More independent bookstores, more book sales?

James Patterson:

I think the goal is just more people reading. And to do that, a lot of things have to happen. Actually, to me, the group that can do the most good here is Amazon. Amazon could actually dedicate itself to saving books and literature in this country. It really could. And that would be the easiest fix, directionally.

I think they probably think they’re doing that, but they’re not, at least not yet. Yes, they want to lower prices, and you know, theoretically that’s fine, but I don’t know how we’d do that on a practical level and keep stores… You know, in terms of evolving the system as opposed to fracturing the system, [Amazon is] in a position to do something. The government is in a position to do something. Ironically, you know, we have a very liberal president, and he doesn’t seem terribly interested in the subject, unfortunately. I know he’s got a lot on his plate already, but you know. I mean, look, all over Europe you have governments who protect the publishers and protect books.

Question:

Yeah, there was that New York Times Bookends piece recently about how France treats books as an ‘essential good,’ like food and utilities. They’re taxed at lower rates, price discounts are pretty severely controlled. Is that a model that you think would be useful?

James Patterson:

No, I don’t think it’s a model, but I think it’s something to pay attention to. I think the government could be more involved. I mean, obviously the government has stepped in when banks were in trouble and the automobile business was in trouble. I think it’s something that local, state and federal government could be doing more.

This is once again symbolic, the kind of leadership pledge, you know. We’re gonna ask people to write to the President, write to their Congress and their representatives. And have the President take a pledge that once a month, he’ll appear in public carrying a book, he’ll visit a library store, or you know, the local representative. And then to have some of these [politicans] going on record in government sessions that they’re concerned about the state of reading in our country. And they should be.

Because, look, with our kids, and that’s a big deal with me, kids are not reading as broadly as they should and as they used to. We’re getting more and more of this kind of tunnel-vision, get on your little mission to become a doctor, lawyer, mathematician, engineer, etc., and [kids] really don’t read. My son’s at a very good prep school, and they don’t read as much as I’d like them to do, in terms of breadth of reading. You know, they don’t know who a lot of the famous authors [are]. Not that they should matter who they are, but … my own thing about kids at the top [is] that in the course of high school they’re exposed to a couple hundred really good, interesting authors, you know, ranging from Toni Morison to Cormac McCarthy to Truman Capote to Saul Bellow, etc., etc., and just be familiar with different voices and ways of looking at the world. I think that’s important in terms of really good readers.

More important, maybe, is at-risk kids, because, and this is a big deal with me, I do a lot, as much as any individual can do, but at-risk kids, if they’re not… if they don’t become competent readers—I’m not talking about readers for life, I’m talking about competent readers—how are they going to get through high school? If you’re not a competent reader. And that’s an epidemic around this country, kids who cannot read at a competent level. How you gonna do history, how you gonna do science? You just can’t. I mean, you sit there and you struggle and it takes 15 minutes to read the first page. That doesn’t work. In a lot of cases, it’s correctible.

Question:

There’s research that says that kids who grow up in a household where there are books in the house are more likely to become constant readers than those who don’t. 

James Patterson:

That’s a piece of it. That’s a piece of it. What happens in the schools is a piece of it. I just gave a talk, and I was asked to talk on this subject in front of all of the middle school principals in New York City, public schools, and they asked me to talk about the principals encouraging students to read for fun, to read extra stuff, to read outside of the Common Core, to read things, because the more they read the better they get at it. It’s really simple. I’ll go into schools and I’ll go, ‘Who plays soccer?’ ‘Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ ‘You better now or three years ago?’ ‘We’re better now! Yeah!’ ‘How come?’ ‘Cause we play a lot! Yeah!’ ‘Okay, same thing, dudes.’ If you read, and you can read fun stuff, you can read comic books, you can read a lot of different… there’s a lot of ways to get that exercise, get that reading muscle worked on. If you do that, you will become good readers, and school will be easier.“

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“They Use, For Example, These So-Called ‘Twitter Bombs'”

November 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A little more insight into the online recruitment methods of the Islamic State, which employs both medieval barbarism and new-school social networks, from Britta Sandberg’s Spiegel interview with former FBI agent Ali Soufan:

“Spiegel: 

Do you know how many people are working in the IS propaganda department?

Ali Soufan:

We do know that a whole army of bloggers, writers and people who do nothing else other than to watch social media are working for IS. According to our research, most are based in the Gulf region or North Africa. The program was started by Abu Amr Al-Shami, a Syrian born in Saudi Arabia. And we know that at one point more than 12,000 Twitter accounts were connected to IS. This is one of the unique tactics used by this group: the decentralization of its propaganda work. The Islamic State has maximized control of its message by giving up control of its delivery. This is new.

Spiegel:

What does that mean in reality?

Ali Soufan:

They use, for example, these so-called ‘Twitter bombs’ by following the most popular hashtags on the social media service, like the one for the 2014 World Cup. They send out messages using those hashtags so that everybody following the hashtag #worldcup will receive messages from IS, even if they aren’t interested in it.

Spiegel:

And this method is successful? They are recruiting among World Cup football fans?

Ali Soufan:

There are millions and millions of people around the world who will get the message. They have amazing reach, but only hope to have an impact on 1 or 2 percent of the targeted population. In June 2014 they had only 12,000 foreign fighters, but today there are 16,000 foreign fighters within IS. They include recruits from China, Indonesia and, of course, Europe as well. They send their messages in many different languages, even Dutch.”

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