Urban Studies

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“I Thought I Was Going To Jail For Life”

February 7, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Matt Taibbi is a great talent and his targets in the financial and political sectors are righteous ones, but I still have misgivings about him. I don’t think he exactly rushes to correct himself when he proves to be wrong, and he’s working at a furious pace where he’s had to cut corners that should not be cut. But he’s a fascinating reporter, especially since his sensibilities belong to an earlier, prose-driven, pre-Internet age. He just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Matt, a line of yours is lodged in my head: “Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.” Unfortunately, while the animosity of Occupy Wall Street is still strong in early 2013, the disorganization of the movement might be even stronger.

So, if you were in charge of Occupy Wall Street, what single achievable goal would you (re)organize the movement around?

Answer:

Again, to repeat, breaking up the banks is the big thing. That should be the Holy Grail of activist goals. Everything flows from the Too Big To Fail problem. If that can be accomplished, we’re off and running. And it’s not far-fetched. There are a lot of people even in DC coming around to the idea.

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Question:

Matt, you lived in Russia for a while and wrote about and did a lot of interesting and intense things, like messing with the mob, checking out Siberian prisons, and partying pretty hard. Russia is a place where they kill journalists for merely existing, so my question is: how did you not die?

Answer:

Purely by accident. Honestly, there were some close calls. A lot of bad decisions while I was there, many of them under the influence. One very funny story I’ve never told: I once worked with a Russian paper called “Stringer” to wiretap Alexander Voloshin, Putin’s chief of staff. We published a week of his phone calls. I was so afraid of the consequences, I stayed out of the country when we published. Upon my return I was detained at the airport for 10 hours. I thought I was going to jail for life. In fact, the Russians were simply concerned that the lamination on my passport was coming up in one corner. They thought my passport was fake. Once they reached the embassy, they let me go. But that was one scary 10 hours.

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Question:

Did you ever meet Hunter S. Thompson?

Answer: 

Years ago, when I was in my twenties, I was asked by a book publishing company to edit an anthology of “Gonzo Journalism.” Not long into the project I realized there was no such thing as “Gonzo Journalism” as a genre per se, it just meant “written by Hunter Thompson.” But I was broke and needed the job. So I called Hunter to ask him what he thought. He said, “That’s a shitty assignment.” I told him I probably agreed. He said, “How badly do you need the money?” I said, “Badly.” He said, “Well, good luck, but I’m not going to help you with it. No offense.” I said none taken and that was it. That was the only time I ever talked to Hunter. It was a funny call, though. 

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Question:

Did you really throw your coffee at Vanity Fair’s James Verini when he said he didn’t like your book? 

Answer: 

I absolutely did throw coffee at James Verini, and it had nothing to do with him not liking my book. Let’s leave it at that for now. I’ll tell the full story someday.

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“George McDonald Is Already Better Than Any Mayor Has Ever Been At Addressing The Most Obstinate Social Problems In This City’s Modern History”

February 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two of the heroes in New York City’s ongoing struggle against poverty are Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem’s Children Zone and George McDonald of the Doe Fund. The opening of Hamilton Nolan’s excellent Gawker post about the latter organization, a homelessness-ending program started by McDonald, who is running a quixotic candidacy to be New York’s next mayor:

“The next mayor of New York City will not be George McDonald, though George McDonald is running for mayor. That’s OK. George McDonald is already better than any mayor has ever been at addressing the most obstinate social problems in this city’s modern history.

Homelessness. Poverty. Unemployment. These problems are usually seen as intractable, overwhelming, and hopelessly complex. They certainly can be, for those suffering their effects. But solving these problems is not a mystery at all. There is a nonprofit group in New York City called The Doe Fund that has developed perhaps the single most effective formula in existence for moving people from the streets to productive society.

Here is what they do: They take in homeless people, referred to them by places like Bellevue Hospital. Many of these people are fresh out of prison, with little safety net. They house them. They ensure they’re sober and make them abide by a schedule. They give them a job for starters—cleaning up trash around the city, for a month. The men in all-blue jumpsuits you see pushing brooms and emptying trash cans throughout New York are Doe Funders.

After that, the fund gives them classes in life skills and specific job training (they can choose between pest control, catering, building maintenance, and other specialties) for the next six months or so. There are mock job interviews, to get the pitch right. Then they send each one out to pound the pavement and find a job. When they find a job, they find them a place to live. By the time a year is up, the Doe Fund has transformed a homeless person into an employed person with a place to live.”

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“Yes, Dear Reader, Even You Will Have Your Job Taken Away By Machines”

February 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Kevin Kelly’s recent (and worthwhile) Wired cover story about the future of workplace robotization, “Better Than Human,” which I only now got around to reading:

“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work.”

 

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Old Print Article: “When Eugenists Disagree,” New York Times (1921)

February 6, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

Leonard Darwin as a boy in 1853 with his mother-aunt, Emma.

Leonard Darwin as a boy in 1853 with his mother-aunt, Emma.

I love science but I know you should approach the “accepted scientific wisdom” of any age with a calm skepticism. If you don’t believe me, check out the opening of this horrifying November 20, 1921 New York Times piece:

“Though nearly unanimous on many fundamentals, the eugenists who came here from all parts of the United States and Europe at the recent second international congress disagreed radically on many of the details of their science.

They are nearly as far apart on the question of cousin marriages as neighborhood gossips, from whom the controversy was borrowed. Papers were read showing the bad effects of cousin marriage. But the President of the congress was Major Leonard Darwin, a son of the great Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin married a cousin. Major Leonard Darwin married a cousin. Major Darwin is the admitted leader of the eugenics movement in England.

The question of delayed marriages caused wide dissension. According to Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, unless the parents are young the children are apt to be inferior. On the other hand, Dr. M.P.E. Groszmann cited evidence that when the father was over 50 at the birth of the child, that child had five times to ten times the chance of being distinguished which another child would have whose father was 40 or under.

‘Casper L. Redfield, in studying the breeding of horses, cows, hens, etc.,’ said Dr. Groszmann, ‘comes to the conclusion that the race-winning colts are the progeny of mature horses that have by long practice attained high speed before the colts were born. Fischer’s statistics of human beings seem to show that other things being equal, the children of older parents ‘exemplify in a striking way the inheritance of acquired characters.’ He claims that the probability of being eminent, when born from a father over 50, is five to ten times that when born from a father of 40 or less.’

While opinions varied greatly on these and certain other complex questions borrowed from biology, the eugenists were nearly unanimous in favor of less birth control for the healthy, talented, intellectual, energetic people; more birth control for those of lesser endowment; the severe restriction of immigration to prevent the inflow of poor stocks and individuals; the segregation and sterilization of habitual criminals and the feeble-minded.

Nervous disorders were traced to the lack of balance in persons whose trunks were overdeveloped, as compared to their limbs, or whose limbs were overdeveloped as compared with their trunks. Persons suffering from a lack of balance in either respect were warned against marriage with persons having the same tendency.”

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“We Can No Longer Risk Making An Expensive Film With A Star Who Isn’t Popular In Asia”

February 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Red Obsessions,” a feature article by Lars Olav-Beier in Spiegel about Asia trying to supplant Hollywood as the global Dream Factory:

“Not just China, but also South Korea and Russia have become more important in the film business in recent years. The Russian market grew by almost 20 percent in 2012, with a film like Ice Age 4 earning $50 million there, or more than half of its budget.

‘We can no longer risk making an expensive film with a star who isn’t popular in Asia,’ says Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean). While American films earned up to two-thirds of their revenues in North America in the 1980s, today it averages only about one third.

Hollywood has been beset by fears of a sellout, ever since Indian investment firm Reliance acquired the majority of the DreamWorks film studio and a Chinese company bought the second-largest movie theater chain in the United States. Finally, in mid-January the Chinese electronics company TLC bought the naming rights to Grauman’s Chinese Theater in the heart of Hollywood, one of the most famous movie theaters in the United States. It seems only a matter of time before the Chinese buy their first Hollywood studio.

It’s happened once before, now more than 20 years ago, that Asians, specifically Japanese companies like Sony, acquired a number of studios. ‘China wants something different from Hollywood than what Japan wanted at the time,’ says American industry expert Thomas Plate. ‘It isn’t as much about money as it is about know-how.’

Of course, money isn’t the only issue for Hollywood, either. America sees cinema as its very own art form, tailor-made for telling the world American stories and celebrating American values. ‘We’ll still be making movies about American football in the future,’ says Bruckheimer, ‘but with much smaller budgets. That’s because it’s almost exclusively American viewers who are interested in football.’ Bruckheimer exhorts his screenwriters to think internationally and write roles for Asian stars into films.”

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“A Syndrome Characterized By Constant Anxiety In Relation To One’s Mobile Phone”

February 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Fake, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The choice for the best word of 2012 from the committee at the Australian dictionary, the Macquarie:

phantom vibration syndrome

noun a syndrome characterised by constant anxiety in relation to one’s mobile phone and an obsessional conviction that the phone has vibrated in response to an incoming call when in fact it hasn’t.

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And the people’s choice:

First World problem

noun a problem that relates to the affluent lifestyle associated with the First World, and that would never arise in the poverty-stricken circumstances of the Third World, as having to settle for plunger coffee when one’s espresso machine is not functioning.

“All Of Mankind Is Now An Extraordinary Scientific Race”

February 6, 2013 in Books, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A little-seen Swedish-produced (though English-language) 1966 documentary about Norman Mailer, who trashes all things American, including its architecture and auto design and politics and drug culture and embrace of science. 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

February 5, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"It came to me like a massive tsunami."

“It came to me like a massive tsunami.”

PARTNER WANTED – I’ll Make You Famous (Financial District)

If you’re reading this and have the following:

– A desire to be an Internationally Known Business Mogul;

– A desire to be one of the Founders of one of the Most Innovative Products in Your Time (One of the Best Kept Secret to Date);

– At Least $25,000.00 to invest in this venture;

– A Bullet Proof Credit Rating;

– An Entrepreneurial Mindset;

– Nerves of Steel;

– A Never Say Die Attitude

Then keep on reading!

Twelve years ago, I developed a product that I and thousands of people thought was going to revolutionize 
not only the multi-billion dollar industry which it is in, but the world as we know it today!

I began the mission to produce and perfect this product over a 6 year period. I utilized 3 top engineers from the Ford Motor Company to assist on this project.

I even used manufacturers from the very industry that this product was being designed to change.

Prototype after prototype was built, each one better than the last, but still we could not attain the standards which I set at the very beginning of this project.

After thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars spent on this mission, many of those involved gave up.

The project was shelved and deemed ahead of its time.

Seven years later, it came to me like a massive tsunami. This idea, if it could be proven would answer all that was missing on the product from our original project.

Thinking outside the industry changed my thought process and produced an innovative way to build this product 
which will NOW change one of the most prolific industries in the world forever.

I am the inventor, engineer, designer, and manufacturer of this product. I’ve built the perfect model and tested it for 12 months.

I currently hold all rights to it and am the only one who knows how it works.

There are at least 3-4 patentable components and I have already one patent pending.

I have been a very successful businessman for over 25 years and until my stalemate with this project in 2006 have never failed.

Well I don’t intend on failing with this and in fact plan on changing the world and all of those who are involved with this project in the beginning.

I AM LOOKING FOR A FINANCIAL PARTNER PASSIVE OR ACTIVE!

This isn’t a “Could Change Your Life” proposition. This is a “WILL Change You and Your Future Grandchildren’s Lives” Proposition.

I guarantee… you will never, ever come across an opportunity like this again!

I seriously compromised my credit and financial situation with this venture, (didn’t file BK though) however, I still have the most important ingredient to success… MY MIND, Vendors, and product and a bullet-proof working PROTOTYPE!

I NEED ONE MORE PARTNER!

Are you the one? Or should I say is this the one for you?

If you are ready to get involved with a global product launch, I have the product and business plan. I need a little more money and credit to build and market this venture. 
I will make you a founder and a huge equity partner.

I already have a company willing to take us public in 4 to 6 months to raise $20-$50 million dollars once we get the machines running, 
and that’s just based on our business plan and product concept.

This could be huge for you!

Contact me via email and tell me why you and how you could help move this project. I will call you and send you all of the info on this venture.

Thanks for reading and Let’s Do Something Great Together!

“In One Of American History’s Closest Calls, The Two Never Spoke A Word To Each Other”

February 5, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, two great figures of their age, never shook hands or spoke despite their often close proximity, which was made all the closer as a result of the poet volunteering as a nurse during the Civil War. From Jamie Stiehm at the New York Times’ Disunion blog, a passage about their “relationship”:

“Above all, Whitman studied the stars and waves of Lincoln’s mercurial character the way a great sculptor might gaze at his craggy countenance or larger-than-life hands. The poet came to know the routes of the president’s carriage. When he saw it passing by, he stood with hat in hand. He kept a lookout in the summer months, when Lincoln rode daily along Seventh Street out to a peaceful family retreat at the Soldiers Home, three miles away from crush of his callers. Whitman was once inside the executive mansion to see John Hay, the president’s secretary. He was standing close to Lincoln, who was animatedly engaged in another conversation, but went on his way, loath to interrupt him.

As Whitman later recounted, he exchanged nods, bows and waves with Lincoln several times over a few years and saw the president shake hundreds, if not thousands, of hands at a party. But not Whitman’s. In one of American history’s closest calls, the two never spoke a word to each other. (Though it is believed that Lincoln, 10 years older, read some of the poet’s work aloud back in Springfield, Ill.)

Whitman nevertheless felt he got a good fix on Lincoln. ‘I love the president personally,’ he declared. Well he might, because years earlier he had imagined a bearded president from the prairie, the West who was ‘heroic, shrewd, fully informed.’ Lincoln was nothing if not a shrewd, strong outsider, which helped make him the one man alive capable of settling the old sectional divide sundering the nation.”

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“Neither Of The Youngest Lykov Children Had Ever Seen A Human Being Who Was Not A Member Of Their Family”

February 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1978, Soviet geologists were stunned while exploring the remote Siberian taiga when they happened across a deeply religious family that had retreated 40 years earlier from their country’s attempts at modernization, as well as all outside human contact and communication. They were so isolated that they were blissfully unaware of that horror known as World War II. From Mike Dash at the Smithsonian site:

“Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man’s name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer—a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century. Old Believers had been persecuted since the days of Peter the Great, and Lykov talked about it as though it had happened only yesterday; for him, Peter was a personal enemy and ‘the anti-Christ in human form’—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar’s campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly ‘chopping off the beards of Christians.’ But these centuries-old hatreds were conflated with more recent grievances; Karp was prone to complain in the same breath about a merchant who had refused to make a gift of 26 poods [940 pounds] of potatoes to the Old Believers sometime around 1900.

Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov’s brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.

Peter the Great’s attempts to modernize the Russia of the early 18th century found a focal point in a campaign to end the wearing of beards. Facial hair was taxed and non-payers were compulsorily shaved—anathema to Karp Lykov and the Old Believers.

That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, ‘was for everyone to recount their dreams.'”

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“I Think That Security Does Deter Crime In General And Mass Killings In Particular”

February 5, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Shaun Randol interviews Paul Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, who agrees with David Mamet that we should have armed security in schools. An excerpt:

“Shaun Randol: 

You mention how we’re not going to have policing in public spaces anytime soon —

Paul Barrett: 

I said a ‘police state.’ We, of course, have plenty of policing of public spaces. We have public spaces that are basically locked down. You can’t get into a federal courthouse without getting thoroughly searched. It would be very, very difficult to get in there with a firearm. You can’t get past security in an American airport without being pretty thoroughly searched. We have lots of security in lots of situations.

I think that security does deter crime in general and mass killings in particular. With this debate about what we do about schools, the proposal [by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre] that has been lampooned by a lot of people, I personally think is a very reasonable proposal.

Shaun Randol: 

Please elaborate.

Paul Barrett: 

I’ve written about this for Businessweek. We have grown accustomed, in this country, to having a fair amount of security in many kinds of public and private venues where a lot of people gather. There is security in the building that you and I are sitting in right now. Not just anyone can walk in.

When you go to Yankee Stadium to see a baseball game, you can’t just walk into Yankee Stadium. They channel you through certain entranceways and, if you’re carrying a bag, they’re going to search your bag. The guys who take your tickets are there to also look you over, and there’s both uniformed and plainclothes security throughout the stadium.

I think all of those steps are rational steps. I don’t think they’re perfect, but I do think they do deter crime and they would deter a mass suicide-killing episode in those venues. Therefore, if you are truly anxious about securing schools, I can’t see the serious argument against having armed security at schools. It doesn’t seem to me to be a distraction. It doesn’t seem to me to be a panacea, either. It’s not perfect, but few social policies are perfect.”

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“It’s A Little Bit Like Science Fiction”

February 5, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Via the BBC, a video of a “bionic man,” replete with artificial organs and synthetic blood. It seems like a prank, but it’s not a prank, is it?

A Note From 1868 About A Skeevy Steamboat

February 4, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 6, 1868 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“The steamboat Allison, yesterday at three o’clock, left for the Coney Island from Fulton Ferry with as large a load of thieves, gamblers, strikers, pimps, roughs and prostitutes, as it were ever the misfortune for one boat to carry. Scarcely had the boat left the wharf, when the thieves commenced to sing vulgar and obscene songs in the ladies’ cabins. Captain Wilson, who was in command of the boat, ordered them to stop, whereupon they commenced to assault and maltreat him.”

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“There Is No Meat Sold At One Of The Largest Grocery Stores In Town”

February 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Emily Esfahani Smith’s new Atlantic article, “The Lovely Hill: Where People Live Longer and Happier,” a passage about the healthy lifestyle of one of the long-lived residents of Loma Linda, California, the 98-year-old surgeon Ellsworth Wareham:

“As a middle-aged man, Wareham spent a lot of time in the operating room cutting into one patient after another who had heart problems. There, he noticed something: patients who were vegetarian mostly had much cleaner and smoother arteries than those who ate meat. The arteries of meat-eaters tended to be full of calcium and plaque.

So he made a choice. He decided to become a vegan. That decision was not too hard to make given the fact that many of the inhabitants of his southern Californian community were already very health conscious. Consider: there is no meat sold at one of the largest grocery stores in town. In fact, as recently as a generation ago, meat was difficult to find in the grocery stores of Loma Linda, as the New York Times reports. On top of that, smoking is banned in the town; alcohol is scarcely available; and fast food restaurants are hard to come by.

But make no mistake: Loma Linda is not some bohemian enclave of free-spirited vegans. Rather, what makes the community remarkable — and remarkably health conscious — is that it is home to one of the largest concentrations of Seventh-Day Adventists in the world. A conservative denomination of Christianity founded during this country’s Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s, the religion advocates a healthy lifestyle as a main tenet of the faith. This is a major reason why Wareham, a Seventh-Day Adventist, takes his health so seriously.”

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“You Brought With You On The Airplane A Rifle”

February 3, 2013 in Books, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Hunter S. Thompson brought a rifle with him on a commercial flight to New York when visiting David Letterman in 1988. Such an innocent time.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

February 3, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

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“It sends out a strange beeping noise just before it passes by.”

Are the subway cars crashing anyone else?

I’ve noticed with the newer subway cars on the track, it sends out a strange beeping noise just before it passes by. This noise actually happens at just about the same time my computer crashes or the TV freezes. I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this intrusion of the MTA equipment.

“Right Now The U.S. Is The Only Nation That Operates Drones On A Large Scale, But That Will Change”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Drones will be used in the U.S. to deliver goods and aid police, but someday soon we might not be worried about a plane flying into a tower but instead a bird–wait, that is a bird, right? From a really good Time article by Lev Grossman about drones proliferating in the private sector:

“Drones are learning to think for themselves. Those University of Pennsylvania drones are already semiautonomous: you can toss a hoop in the air and they’ll plot a trajectory and fly right through it. (Whether or not you count Google’s self-driving cars as people-carrying, highway-borne drones seems like a question of semantics.) They’re also gaining endurance. In June, Boeing tested a liquid-hydrogen-powered drone called the Phantom Eye that’s designed to cruise at 65,000 ft. for four days at a time. Boeing’s Solar Eagle, which has a 400-ft. wingspan, is scheduled for testing in 2014. Its flights will last for five years.

This technology will inevitably flow from the military sphere into the civilian, and it’s very hard to say what the consequences will be, except that they’ll be unexpected. Drones will carry pizzas across towns and drugs across borders. They’ll spot criminals on the run and naked celebrities in their homes. They’ll get cheaper to buy and easier to use. What will the country look like when anybody with $50 and an iPhone can run a surveillance drone? Last fall the law schools at Stanford and NYU issued a report, ‘Life Under Drones,’ which was based on 130 interviews with Pakistanis. It makes for unsettling reading. ‘Drones are always on my mind,’ said a man from Islamabad. ‘It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them. You know they are there.’

Right now the U.S. is the only nation that operates drones on a large scale, but that will change: flying drones is hard, but it’s not that hard. Singer estimates that there are 76 other countries either developing drones or shopping for them; both Hizballah and Hamas have flown drones already. In November, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 17 years for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with remote-controlled planes. (The drone equivalent of the Newtown, Conn., atrocity is simply beyond contemplation.) The moral ambiguity of covert drone strikes will clarify itself very quickly if another country claims the right under international law to strike its enemies in the U.S. There may come a day when the U.S. bitterly regrets the precedents it has set.”

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“Easy Answers Like ‘Skills Training’ Won’t Necessarily Help Much”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological innovation leads to great wealth for a few but the struggle with creative disruption can last for most people for decades–until, at long last, hopefully, prosperity arrives. But until then–wow–painful! From a new Business Insider interview with Paul Krugman about the rise of the machines:  

“Whereas from about 1980 to 2000, the discussion about inequality was mostly seen as labor vs. labor (high-paid, high-skilled workers vs low-paid, low-skilled workers) the new story is about labor vs. capital a topic that is more taboo.

[Krugman] notes that there have been periods before where workers went several decades without reaping the benefits of capital-favoring technologies (the industrial revolution), and it’s possible that we’re in a period like that now, which unfortunately means that easy answers like ‘skills training’ won’t necessarily help much.’

As for the specific technologies that he’s intrigued by right now, he mentioned driverless cars and speech recognition, both of which use ‘big data’ to accomplish something that we previously thought required human intelligence.”

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A Note From 1847 About A Broken Engagement

February 3, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 31, 1847 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“A very melancholy affair occurred at Mount Pleasant, near Sing Sing, on Sunday last, the facts of which case have been furnished by a gentleman who came down from the place yesterday morning. A man named Amos Northrup, aged 45 years, a native of Newcastle, had been for some time engaged to marry Miss Mary Goodheart, a young woman 15 years of age. But from recent exhibitions he made of violent and ungovernable temper, she felt it her duty to break off the match, and so stated to him Sunday last, at the residence of her sister. On hearing this he immediately stabbed her, when she cried out to her sister, ‘He is murdering me!’ and ‘Jump out the window!’ Both young women then jumped out of the window together and fell upon the ground, uninjured by the fall. Mary was mortally wounded and died in a few minutes. Her sister states that she saw the handle of the dirk, as Northrup plunged it into her breast. The murderer escaped while the brother and sister were carrying the body into the house. Parties of citizens assembled and commenced searching the country for him, but he had not been taken at the last accounts. He is six feet high, stout built, rather bony. Has light hair and complexion, down cast look. He may have escaped to N.Y. city.”

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“I Pledge Of Allegiance To The Flag”

February 3, 2013 in Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Do you remember when astronauts recited the Pledge of Allegiance before the Super Bowl and the Halftime Show was a college marching band? Me neither.

Before the game was sold as a global event, it was a national one. At Super Bowl III in the Orange Bowl in 1969, a trio of Apollo 8 astronauts led the crowd–which included Joe and Ted Kennedy, Bob Hope and Spiro Agnew–in pledging allegiance to the U.S. flag. The Florida A&M University marching band entertained between halves.

The Jets became the first AFL team to win the game, defeating the heavily favored Colts, solidifying the planned NFL-AFL merger. Joe Namath became a national sensation, having boldly predicted the upset. A very gifted and confident quarterback who threw tons of interceptions, Namath was a very good player who would forever be overrated as great because of this game.

“The New Research Seeks To Mine Web Data To Predict All Kinds Of Events”

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

Marshall McLuhan wondered how the new environment would be programmed in the Digital Age, but here’s another important question: How will use our new access to predict the future? Researchers are currently studying decades of newspaper archives in an effort to protect us from dangers in the queue. From Gigaom:

“Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them.

The new research is the latest in a number of similar initiatives that seek to mine web data to predict all kinds of events. Recorded Future, for instance, analyzes news, blogs and social media to ‘help identify predictive signals’for a variety of industries, including financial services and defense. Researchers are also using Twitter and Google to track flu outbreaks.

Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky of the Technion-Israel Institute describe their work in a newly released paper, ‘Mining the Web to Predict Future Events‘ (PDF). For example, they examined the way that news about natural disasters like storms and droughts could be used to predict cholera outbreaks in Angola. Following those weather events, ‘alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance,’ they write.

Horvitz and Radinsky acknowledge that epidemiologists look at some of the same relationships, but ‘such studies are typically few in number, employ heuristic assessments, and are frequently retrospective analyses, rather than aimed at generating predictions for guiding near-term action.’”

“I Was Walking Around Like That For Weeks”

February 1, 2013 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1974, David Frost interviewed football coach Brian Clough, who had just had a tempestuous 44-day reign in charge of Leeds United. The video is most notable because the great Michael Sheen has portrayed both subjects, the interviewer in Frost/Nixon and the interviewee in The Damned United.

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Upton Sinclair, Pumping Oil! (1927)

January 31, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just read Chip Brown’s New York Times Magazine piece about the boomtown that North Dakota has become thanks to its massive oil reserves in this post-peak age, which reminded of this classic photograph of Upton Sinclair selling bowdlerized copies (the so-called fig-leaf edition) of his novel Oil! on a street in Boston, where the book was banned. (This novel is the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson’s great film There Will Be Blood.) The Beantown controversy helped boost Oil! to bestseller status. Sinclair, a radical firebrand, was no stranger to such public contretemps, whether running for the office of governor or hatching plans for a commune near the Palisades in New Jersey. On the latter topic, here’s a passage from a 1906 New York Times article about the formation that year of Sinclair’s techno-Socialist collective, Helicon Home Colony, which burned to the ground the year after its establishment:

“Not less than 300 persons answered Upton Sinclair’s call for a preliminary meeting at the Berkeley Lyceum last night of all those who are interested in a home colony to be organized for the purpose of applying machinery to domestic processes, and incidentally to solve the servant problem. The idea of the proposed colony is to syndicate the management of children and other home worries, such as laundering, gardening, and milking cows.

The response to Mr. Sinclair’s call gratified him immensely. When he went on the stage he was smiling almost ecstatically. The audience applauded him and then began to mop their faces, for the little Lyceum was almost filled, and some one had to shut the front doors.

The audience was made up almost equally of men and women. A large proportion seemed to be of foreign birth. Many of them were Socialists, judging from their manifestations of sympathy for Socialistic doctrines. The mentioning of two newspapers which disapprove of Socialism on their editorial pages was hissed. Mr. Sinclair himself said that he had thought of asking a Socialist to act as temporary Chairman, but that his man had thought that two Socialists on the stage at the same time would frighten the more conservative members.

The meeting lasted about two hours. Mr. Sinclair, at various times, had the floor about an hour and a half. Now and then the arguments caused a high pitch for excitement, and more than once four people were trying to talk at the same time. In the end always, however, what Mr. Sinclair suggested was accepted, including the appointment of committees and other preliminaries of organization.

For Mr. Sinclair is certain that his home colony is to come about. He said in his introductions that he had about a dozen people who had agreed to go in with him, whether anybody else did or not. But last night’s meeting indicated, in Mr. Sinclair’s opinion, that a home colony of at least 100 families could easily be organized.”

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“What Did You Want That You Didn’t Get?”

January 31, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

An odd 1981 report from Mike Wallace about rebirthing, a personal growth technique that uses breathing to try to heal the supposed psychological trauma of the birth process. It was the decade that alternative medicines of the previous 15 years–many of them painfully narcissistic–began to receive their own section in even the most mainstream bookstores.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 31, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Young apprentice."

“Young apprentice.”

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I cant help myself but dive into the politics to institute policy changes. MC’s are designed to move crowds. It’s in my blood. I will speak from the heart therefore the message and policies will be 4 the people. Young apprentice, age #23. All is appreciated. 

$1,000 to $10,000 denominations.

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