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“No One Can Be Happy With A Situation That Reduces The Library To A Starbucks Wannabe”

October 29, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his NYRB piece “What Libraries Can (Still) Do” James Gleick takes a hopeful view of a foundering institution, seeing a 2.0 life for those formerly vaunted knowledge centers, once-liberating forces now chiefly a collection of dusty rooms offering short blocks of free computer-terminal time to those lacking a wi-fi connection. I wish I could share his cautious optimism, but the inefficiency inherent in a library search seems a deal breaker in this age.

Gleick references John Palfrey’s manifesto BiblioTech (which he probably didn’t borrow from a library) in urging these erstwhile knowledge storehouses to become stewards and curators rather than trying to be exhaustive collections. That sounds right, but Palfrey’s assertion that “our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library” is a truth that ignores a bigger truth: That’s the very thing our transactional souls seem to want. We’ll sell our attention–our privacy, even–if the return is something that flatters or conveniences us.

From Gleick:

Is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold? Perversely, the most popular service at some libraries has become free Internet access. People wait in line for terminals that will let them play solitaire and Minecraft, and librarians provide coffee. Other patrons stay in their cars outside just to use the Wi-Fi. No one can be happy with a situation that reduces the library to a Starbucks wannabe.

Perhaps worst of all: the “bookless library” is now a thing. You can look it up in Wikipedia.

I’m an optimist. I think the pessimists and the worriers—and this includes some librarians—are taking their eyes off the ball. The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world, where we still need books, microfilm, diaries and letters, maps and manuscripts, and the experts who know how to find, organize, and share them.

In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest. In his new book, BiblioTech, a wise and passionate manifesto, John Palfrey reminds us that the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy.•

Tags: James Gleick, John Palfrey

Old Print Article: 20 Years Before Luther Burbank’s Fall From Grace, New York Times (1906)

October 28, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

By any standards, California’s Luther Burbank was a virtuoso botanist and horticulturist, mixing, matching and creating. Among the hundreds of exotic varieties he hatched from his experimental Santa Rosa farm, greenhouse and nursery–which included plants, potatoes, fruits and flowers–was the spineless cactus. The “plant wizard,” as he was called, was a beloved public figure until months before his death in 1926 when he created a furor by simply expressing his skepticism about an afterlife. “I am an infidel,” he asserted. Burbank was mocked openly in some quarters for such heresy. Twenty years before his dramatic, if abbreviated, fall from grace, he was the subject an admiring 1906 New York Times profile. The opening:

Every summer our transatlantic steamers are burdened with great throngs of travelers beginning their pilgrimages to the shrines of departed genius. In America, too, we may visit places made illustrious by the former presence of Washington, Jefferson, Lee, Lincoln, Emerson, Poe, and other native men of genius. But, disguise it as we will, the visits are at last to cemeteries, where everything is described in the past tense.

But there is in America at this moment a man of the very greatest genius, just in the flower of his fame, a visit to whom not only emphasizes his genius and his leadership in thought and living things, but also enables one to see far into the future. There is a searchlight of truth in constant operation at Santa Rosa, Cal., and the mind and heart of Luther Burbank are the lenses through which the light is focused. Long ago I resolved to beg the privilege of standing near the searchlight and making a few observations as it illumined some of the peaks of knowledge I could never hope to scale.

Our so-called “Captains of Industry” are busy men, but many of their duties and responsibilities they may delegate to others. Luther Burbank is the busiest man in the world. I make that statement without fear of successful contradiction. His ship is alone on a vast sea of nature’s secrets. With him on the voyage of discovery are a few near relations to encourage him, a dear friend or two for protection and companionship, and several humble helpers to feed the boilers and oil the engines. But he is more alone than was Columbus, because he has no first officer, no second officer, no mate. Like Columbus, upon him alone falls the responsibility for the expedition; he alone knows why the vessel’s prow is kept always in one direction; he alone has faith that it must ultimately touch the shores of truth and reality.•

“He Further Envisions The Rise Of ‘Evolutionary Intelligence Agents'”

October 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There were three people ahead of me at the checkout line at Best Buy yesterday, and it took 45 minutes to pay for my purchase, so I hope human beings are soon replaced by superintelligent robots. We had our shot. Didn’t pan out.

I’m not one who thinks conscious machines are on the verge of “awakening” and destroying us, but I acknowledge that as AI assumes more responsibilities and is permitted to teach itself via Deep Learning, ghosts within those systems can lead to a cascading disaster.

From Andrew Lohn, Andrew Parasiliti and William Welser IV at Time:

Forbes reported this month: “The vision of talking to your computer like in Star Trek and it fully understanding and executing those commands are about to become reality in the next 5 years.” Antoine Blondeau, CEO at Sentient Technologies Holdings, recently told Wired that in five years he expects “massive gains” for human efficiency as a result of artificial intelligence, especially in the fields of health care, finance, logistics and retail.

Blondeau further envisions the rise of “evolutionary intelligence agents,” that is, computers which “evolve by themselves – trained to survive and thrive by writing their own code—spawning trillions of computer programs to solve incredibly complex problems.”

While Silicon Valley enthusiasts hail the potential gains from artificial intelligence for human efficiency and the social good, Hollywood has hyped its threats. AI-based enemies have been box office draws at least since HAL cut Frank Poole’s oxygen hose in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And 2015 has truly been the year of fictional AI provocateurs and villains with blockbuster movies including Terminator Genisys, Ex-Machina, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron.

But are the risks of AI the domain of libertarians and moviemakers, or are there red flags to be seen in the specter of “intelligence agents?” Silicon Valley cannot have “exponential” technological growth and expect only positive outcomes. Similarly, Luddites can’t wish away the age of AI, even if it might not be the version we see in the movies.•

Tags: Andrew Lohn, Andrew Parasiliti, Antoine Blondeau, William Welser IV

“The Single Most Jarring Of All These Changes For Me…Is The Disappearance Of Children Playing In The Streets”

October 27, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Far fewer American children are playing tackle football in recent years, which might seem a very sane reaction to knowledge about brain injuries caused by the sport, but, in fact, participation in all youth athletics around the country is off by surprising numbers. Where have all the children gone?

Most of them have their heads inside a different type of cloud, the information kind. It’s certainly a life lived more virtually by everyone, but children today are on the front lines of an indoors revolution, Huck Finn now a hologram, and it’s almost strange when you encounter them playing in the streets. In this new arrangement, something’s gained and something’s lost.

In Andrew Holter’s Paris Review Q&A with Luc Sante, the great writer speaks to this point while discussing his latest book about low life, The Other Paris. The opening:

Question:

Flaneurie is a huge part of The Other Paris—you call the flaneur the “exemplar of this book.” Since flaneurs have been the truest historians of Paris, did you find the act of walking at all important to your research? For as much consideration as you give to the social consequences of the built environment, it seems like a dérive or two might go a long way toward finding the essence of Paris from “the accumulated mulch of the city itself,” to borrow a phrase from Low Life.

Luc Sante:

When I wasn’t at the movies, I was walking. I walked all over the city, repeatedly—I kept journals of my walks, which are actually just lists of the sequences of streets. Even though the city isn’t as interesting as it once was—modern construction and commercial real-estate practices have wiped out so much of the old eccentricity—there are still hidden corners and ornery survivals, and of course the topography is such a determinant. New York City is more or less flat and what isn’t was mostly leveled long ago, so it’s missing that aspect of accommodation to hills and valleys and plateaux, not to mention the laying out of streets on a human scale long before urban planning scaled things to the demands of machines.

Question:

You describe the “intimacy” of cities up until a century ago, even cities the size of Paris, when by default a person’s neighborhood was fundamental to every part of her life, before the phenomenon of commuting and, most crucial of all, “where the absence of voice- and image-bearing devices in the home caused people to spend much more of their time on the street.” Does it distress you that cities have lost that intimacy? You don’t have much patience for nostalgia.

Luc Sante:

I do regret the passing of that intimacy. It was chipped away in increments, by cars, television, chain stores, fear—parental fears of children’s autonomy, “fear of crime,” et cetera—commercial and residential zoning, highway construction, urban renewal, escalating rents, the takeover by corporations of almost all the formerly owner-operated small businesses—groceries, drugstores, coffee shops, stationers, haberdashers, even bodegas. The last bastions of strictly neighborhood commerce are being rapidly decimated by chains these days. And then personal computers, which definitively drove people indoors. The single most jarring of all these changes for me, because so sudden and so absolute after millennia, is the disappearance of children playing in the streets—but then again that’s not confined to cities. I can’t imagine childhood without having the freedom to roam whatever town you’re in.•

Tags: Andrew Holter, Luc Sante

A Brief Note From 1902 About A Wife Swap

October 27, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 13, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: Henry Masters, Isaiah Peters, Mrs. Masters

“The Debate Has Been Skewed Towards The Job-Destroying Effects Of Technological Change”

October 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Katie Allen has written a Guardian piece about a recent Deloitte study which suggests machines won’t be stealing our jobs. Fucking lazy robots! Get to work!

The research argues that machines have always taken on the worst of jobs, creating better new ones, leaving us with more disposable income for luxuries and grooming and such. I don’t think the report is controversial in its historical view: Technology has traditionally been a job-creating force. The Industrial Revolution was boon, not bane, for workers.

But the past isn’t necessarily prologue. What if it truly is different this time, employment becomes too scarce and the distribution of wealth is exceedingly uneven? In the aggregate, it would be great if AI did a lot of the work, but would you want to be a truck driver right now?

The opening:

In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars.

The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?

A study by economists at the consultancy Deloitte seeks to shed new light on the relationship between jobs and the rise of technology by trawling through census data for England and Wales going back to 1871.

Their conclusion is unremittingly cheerful: rather than destroying jobs, technology has been a “great job-creating machine”. Findings by Deloitte such as a fourfold rise in bar staff since the 1950s or a surge in the number of hairdressers this century suggest to the authors that technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs.

Their study, shortlisted for the Society of Business Economists’ Rybczynski prize, argues that the debate has been skewed towards the job-destroying effects of technological change, which are more easily observed than than its creative aspects.•

Tags: Katie Allen

“A Boob Job Will Only Get You So Far If You Have To Spend Most Of The Day Shrouded In A Manteau“

October 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Plastic surgery certainly says something about us as individuals and perhaps nationally as well. A mass of people in a particular country choose to lift or resize busts or butts or brows for a variety of factors, some of which are shared. In an Economist article, the natural beauties at that publication assign the popularity of rhinoplasty in Iran to women having to cover everything but the face. That still doesn’t speak to why a smaller nose is thought to be more attractive or why so many Persian men are also opting for them. An excerpt:

MANY would agree that Persians are among the world’s most naturally attractive people. Yet ever more of them are submitting to the knife. It is common to see women walking Tehran’s streets sporting a plaster on the bridge of their nose. “It’s just a thing everyone does,” says one woman who had the operation at the age of 19.

Sitting in his brightly coloured surgery in Tehran, Ali Asghar Shirazi explains that the majority of women—and an increasing number of men—are most preoccupied by the size of their snout. “Iranian noses are generally bigger than European ones,” says Mr Shirazi. “They don’t want Western noses; they want smaller ones.”

The phenomenon is perhaps surprising in a country far more conservative than plastic surgery hotspots such as America, Brazil and South Korea. But there is a good reason why Iranians have a penchant for the alteration. “For ladies who have to cover themselves apart from the face, it is the only thing they can show,” says Mr Shirazi. “A boob job will only get you so far if you have to spend most of the day shrouded in a manteau, the mackintosh-like outer garment almost all Iranian women wear.•

Tags: Ali Asghar Shirazi

A Brief Note From 1901 About An Itchy Woman

October 24, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 16, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: Dr. George Joslin, Mrs. Joseph H. Leddy

“Trimming Back Could Increase Profitability For Franchises, Even If It Pushes Out Drivers”

October 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Brian MacIver’s Christian Science Monitor article about autonomous automobiles, former GM executive Larry Burns predicts that Google driverless cars may be road-ready by 2018. That seems very aggressive, but if it’s true, that development would have great benefits, including lives saved and environmental damage mitigated, and pose equally formidable challenges. The piece highlights liability as a major issue, and it’s certainly an obstacle, but it seems a much more surmountable one to me than replacing the tens of millions of jobs that will disappear in the transition.

An excerpt:

For [SAFE CEO] Robbie Diamond, the importance of autonomous electric cars is linked to safeguarding the country’s energy security – and national security.

“We are dependent on one fuel source for the entire transportation sector,” Diamond says. Even as domestic oil production increases, he says, Americans should reduce their reliance on oil across the board.

Diamond also says the driverless car industry “needs to be a faster tortoise or a more focused hare” to make these vehicles widely available as soon as possible.

As for Domino’s Pizza, the country’s largest pizza restaurateur, having a fleet of autonomous vehicles would greatly reduce operating costs for franchises delivering hundreds of pizzas every day.

“Ten million miles per week are covered by Domino’s delivery drivers,” [VP of communications] Lynn Liddle says during the panel at the National Press Club. According to her, most of the company’s delivery drivers use their own cars, gas, and insurance. Franchise owners reimburse them for on-the-job use of their own vehicles. Trimming back could increase profitability for franchises, even if it pushes out drivers.•

Tags: Brian MacIver, Larry Burns, Lynn Liddle, Robbie Diamond

“It Was Probably A Coincidence, A Fluke”

October 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mental illness often expresses itself in terms of the era in which it’s experienced, whether it’s the time of Napoleon’s belated funeral procession or one of a parade of cameras. We live in the latter, and it’s not only the deeply ill who feel paranoid, and for good reason. We are being monitored and measured, corporations wanting what’s in our heads, and with the Internet of Things, the ubiquity of surveillance will reach full saturation, seeming coincidences that are anything but will multiply.

Walter Kirn has written an excellent Atlantic piece about this sense of Digital Age disquiet. His opening:

I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deep sleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.

It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it caused me to glance down at my wristband and then at my phone, a brand-new model with many unknown, untested capabilities. Had my phone picked up my words through its mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled the app?

The devices spoke to each other behind my back—I’d known they would when I “paired” them—but suddenly I was wary of their relationship. Who else did they talk to, and about what? And what happened to their conversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, or forever incorporated into the “cloud,” that ghostly entity with the too-disarming name?

It was the winter of 2013, and these “walnut moments” had been multiplying…•

Tags: Walter Kirn

Old Print Article: Huey P. Long’s Assassin Laid To Rest, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1935)

October 22, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not surprising someone in Louisiana shot Senator Huey P. Long, who had no end of enemies, but it was unexpected that his assassin would be a mild-mannered eye doctor.

Firebrand and lightning rod, “Kingfish,” as he was called, was the Bayou State’s de facto dictator, a populist who planned to run for President on the promise of ending the privations of the Great Depression with his Share Our Wealth redistribution plan. A month after he announced his intentions to face off with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, Long was felled by an unlikely gunman named Dr. Carl A. Weiss, a son-in-law to one of the Senator’s political enemies but not someone suspected by any relative or friend of having murder on his mind. Weiss was immediately killed by the spray of bullets sent his way as Long’s bodyguards returned fire.

In the annals of American assassinations, a sorrowfully long list, there was probably no killer who had a better attended or more solemn funeral than Weiss. A brief article in the September 10, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the scene.

Tags: Carl Weiss, Huey P. Long

“I Love The Soup Cans”

October 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

To celebrate the 1975 film release of Tommy, a gigantic underground party for 1,000 guests was given at closed-down, cleaned-up New York City subway stop. Bill Murray, an unknown then, managed to sneak in and said the dumbest fucking thing to Andy Warhol.

The party was described by gossip columnist Earl Wilson, who was of such a different era that his title for a time was “Saloon Editor“:

New York, N.Y. — A midnight supper dance in the subway was one of the great evenings of the generation. Though it was a promotion for the film, Tommy, everyone had something to say, such as “Does this party stop at 14th St.?”

“What time do we get mugged?” asked one party guest, Fred Robbins.

“You know what I miss–the graffiti,” declared Milton Goldman the agent because the subway stop’s walls had been washed down scrupulously before the party.

About 900 lo 1,000 people were dancing, eating and drinking after the big opening at the Ziegfeld. “How many tokens is this?” I asked. About $50,000 worth, I was told. The film company paid for the 50 to 100 extra security cops.

“I met one of my husbands in the subway and never went back,” actress Sylvia Miles said.

Ann-Margret and Elton John were of course the ones being protected. They danced together. I tried to cut in. Nobody paid me any mind, Elton John said his real name is Reginald Dwight and he pinched Elton from a musician buddy.

Angela Lansbury paid tribute to the food, said she had joy that was “excruciating,” only regretted that she had to walk through horse manure from the police horses to get from the theater lo the subway station.

They were still at it at 2. “This is like the subway’s 5 o’clock rush hour,” Tommy De Maio said. It was probably true that there were people there who’d never been in a subway and actually wondered what it was like down there.•

From Murray’s new Reddit Ask Me Anything:

Question:

What was the best party you’ve ever crashed?

Bill Murray:

Well, we crashed a famous party called the subway party to celebrate the premiere of Tommy, in the 70s. It was Gilda Radner, Belushi, Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty, Brian Doyle Murray, and we were all plus 1, probably. It was biggest party ever in NYC at the time. You couldn’t get into this party. It was an inner circle thing. It was at an enclosed subway stop, it was a roar. It was a scream. If you made an airport movie with everyone on the plane is a celebrity, it was like that times 10. We were doing a show in the restaurant cabaret, the guys catering were the same guys who gave us left over french fries, we went into the backdoor to the subway with everyone. Everyone saying hi, hello. And we felt like we didn’t belong at all. It was so fantastic. I have compassion when people say dumb stuff to me. I said to Andy Warhol “I love the soup cans” and he looked at me like “You don’t belong here.” What a time that was.•

Tags: Andy Warhol, Bill Murray, Earl Wilson

“By The Year 2045, The Word ‘Computer’ Will Be A Relic Of The Past”

October 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I am a horrible person who doesn’t give a crap about Back to the Future Day, or more broadly speaking, most of our culture. What can I tell you?

On this oh-so-sacred day, The Conversation invited a number of thinkers to imagine life in 2045. One recurrent theme in the responses is that everything will be a computer and the experience will be seamless.

It’s likely the Internet of Things becomes the thing and the concept of computers changes radically. I’ll bet against that reality being seamless in three decades, however, not just because I think a lack of friction can be soporific and dangerous, but because things seldom are without wrinkles.

Excerpts follow from two of the predictions.

__________________________

Michael Cowling
Senior Lecturer & Discipline Leader, Mobile Computing & Applications, CQUniversity Australia

By the year 2045, the word “computer” will be a relic of the past, because computers as we know them will be built so seamlessly into every facet of our lives that we won’t even notice them anymore.

Every device around us will become a possible input and output device for us to access a seamless computing experience customised to our own particular needs, and fed from our own personal repository of information stored privately and securely in what we today call the “cloud”, but in the world of 2045 might simply be our digital essence.

It’s hard for us to imagine it now, surrounded by individual devices like our phone, tablet and laptop that each require separate configuration, but by 2045 those devices will be much less important, and we will be able to move away from these individual “personal” devices towards a much more ubiquitous digital existence.

__________________________

Justin Zobel
Head, Department of Computing & Information Systems, University of Melbourne

Interfaces will have become seamless by 2045 and are accessed continuously through familiar, unconscious actions.

During your morning run, body radar triggers a gentle vibration against your skin; someone is approaching around a blind corner.

In the kitchen, active contact lenses create the illusion that your friend is with you, by generating an image and overlaying it on the room. The image is stable, no matter how your head and eyes move. In conversation, she is present but also thousands of kilometres away.

At your desk, the contact lenses create the illusion of a screen in front of you. Its actions are controlled by finger gestures, while your rapid, subtle muscle movements are interpreted as a stream of text to be captured in an email.•

Tags: Justin Zobel, Michael Cowling

A Brief Note From 1901 About A Family Reunion

October 20, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 25, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags: J.H. Collinger, Miss Amy Frantz

“Millionaires Don’t Hire Astrologers. Billionaires Do.”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Using information gained through astrology, tarot cards and hypnosis is probably only a marginally dumber way to play financial markets than by employing sober study and analysis. You could wind up in a barrel supported by suspenders either way. About two decades ago, all manner of hoodoo was apparently welcomed by those looking to make a killing in the market. The opening of Douglas Martin’s 1994 New York Times article about New Age coming Wall Street:

WALL STREET has traditionally been home to bulls and bears. But lately, more extraordinary beings are finding their way to the trading rooms and executive suites of the city’s financial community. These are the psychics, hypnotists and astrologers who bring an extra dimension to the already arcane science of investing money.

Call it a foolish fad, but believers claim that billions of dollars are managed by people who consult planetary movements in advance; and some 27.5 million Americans review the stars to make decisions, according to a 1990 Gallup poll. No one has calculated how many do so for investments, but a mini-industry has emerged around New-Age Wall Street. Consider: A hotel near the stock exchanges is offering a new guest service, a tarot card reader. At the Wall Street Hypnosis Center, 165 William Street, a dozen or so traders visit monthly to keep their unconscious minds honed for split-second decisions. And at the New York Astrology Center, Eighth Avenue at 37th Street, computers and stars are used for investment advice.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, while hardly endorsing metaphysics, finds nothing intrinsically wrong with such unorthodox means of analysis, if fully disclosed, says Michael Jones, a spokesman.

As J. P. Morgan once intoned: “Millionaires don’t hire astrologers. Billionaires do.”

You . . . Are . . . Getting . . . Richer

The hypnotist’s words flow like a stream, as New-Age music fills the book-lined room. “You’re comfortably embraced by the clouds, floating and drifting, floating and drifting,” Ruth Roosevelt purrs. “You get a perspective up here. You see opportunities you didn’t realize you had.”

Ms. Roosevelt, founder of the Wall Street Hypnosis Center, helps clients quit smoking, lose weight — and make investment choices.

She continues: “Perhaps you see a trading pattern that needs to be changed.”

She suggests to her client, Damon Vickers, chief equity strategist for Equigrowth Advisors, an investment company with $15 million under management, that he may find solutions in his subconscious. She says a new hedge fund he is establishing will be doing gangbuster business in a year’s time.

“You’ve been making the money, because you’ve been disciplined,” she says, seeking to underline one of his main trading goals. “You’ve reined in your emotions, so you have clarity of thought and purpose.”

Ms. Roosevelt, who charges $100 an hour, began her practice two years ago, after a long career as a trader, most recently at Prudential Securities, where she was a vice president. She switched to hypnosis, she says, because of a fascination with the mind.

“There is very little I don’t know about the emotions a trader can have,” said Ms. Roosevelt, who studied hypnosis at, among other places, the New York Training Institute for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Ms. Roosevelt sees trading as akin to primitive humans dealing with physically dangerous situations. “At the moment of truth, is it fight or flight, attraction or retrenchment, fear or greed?” she asked. The goal is to bring control and composure to an overpowering situation. This comes from the unconscious, she says.

In practice, this means some traders have to learn to curb their urge to gamble, and let profits run. Others have to pull the trigger and take a sensible risk. Some have developed an aversion to picking up a phone and need to regress to earlier situations — say, calling a girl (or a boy) for a date.

“The trance enhances their power,” she said. “It will enable them to have greater control over themselves or other people.”

To outsiders, it can seem a lot like losing control. Mr. Vickers thinks the benefits are such that he doesn’t care if his customers know about his hypnosis. “If it bothers people, I don’t want them as customers,” he said. “I can’t be anybody but myself.” More Towels? Tarot?

Barrie L. Dolnick is the resident conjurer at the glossy Millenium Hotel at 55 Church Street. Just call the concierge and Ms. Dolnick, a 33-year-old former advertising executive in London and New York, will appear with tarot cards, charms and astrological charts.

Ms. Dolnick turned to conjuring full time because it had already proved profitable part time. At a rate of $100 an hour, she sees more than 200 regular clients in her Union Square office, in addition to those at the Millenium.•

Tags: Douglas Martin

“So What Is Next? 3D Printed Cars. Yes, Cars.”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Beware anyone who believes, as futurist Gray Scott does, that age-reversal science will seriously emerge by 2025, even if they offer the caveat that it will be “extraordinarily expensive, complex and risky,” but some of the other areas of his IEET article “Seven Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World Forever” are quite plausible.

One in particular I think true is the popularization of 3D printers seriously disrupting Big Auto. Startups in garages used to be primarily for computer companies, but soon, quite fittingly, new cars may be coming from them as well.

An excerpt:

3D Printing

Today we already have 3D printers that can print clothing, circuit boards, furniture, homes and chocolate. A company called BigRep has created a 3D printer called the BigRep ONE.2 that enables designers to create entire tables, chairs or coffee tables in one print. Did you get that?

You can now buy a 3D printer and print furniture!

Fashion designers like Iris van Herpen, Bryan Oknyansky, Francis Bitonti, Madeline Gannon, and Daniel Widrig have all broken serious ground in the 3D printed fashion movement. These avant-garde designs may not be functional for the average consumer so what is one to do for a regular tee shirt? Thankfully a new Field Guided Fabrication 3D printer called ELECTROLOOM has arrived that can print and it may put a few major retail chains out of business. The ELECTROLOOM enables anyone to create seamless fabric items on demand.

So what is next? 3D printed cars. Yes, cars. Divergent Microfactories (DM) has recently created a first 3D printed high-performance car called the Blade. This car is no joke. The Blade has a chassis weight of just 61 pounds, goes 0-60 MPH in 2.2 seconds and is powered by a 4-cylinder 700-horsepower bi-fuel internal combustion engine.•

Tags: Gray Scott

“A Journey Of A Thousand Miles Can Begin With A Single Tap Of The Computer Keyboard”

October 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was reading Douglas Coupland’s column about the artifacts of air travel in the aftermath of 9/11, and it reminded me of a 1992 New York Times article by Peter H. Lewis about the early days on online airline reservations, something that wasn’t yet perfected at the time of publication. It was a can’t-miss idea whose time was near but not quite there. The opening:

THESE days, a journey of a thousand miles can begin with a single tap of the computer keyboard.

The best way to get somewhere, some travelers assert, is through the personal computer. Using a computer and a modem, which allows two computers to exchange data over telephone lines, travelers can scan flight schedules and fares, check the weather at the destination, research restaurant reviews, uncover unadvertised bargains and in general tap into the knowledge of most of the world’s travel providers and many veteran travelers.

That’s a lot of traveling without leaving home, and it is a clear trend in the business and leisure travel industry. The rise of personal computers and lightweight portable computers, as well as the growing sophistication of automated telephone services, have allowed tens of thousands of individual travelers to gain access to the same information used by professional travel agents.

According to Steven Sieck, vice president for electronic services for the Link Resources Corporation, a market-research company in New York City, more than six million American households have modem-equipped computers capable of tapping into the various information and electronic mail services. Millions of business computers have modems, too.

“Virtually every electronic mail service and on-line service has access to airline guides, typically O.A.G. or Eaasy Sabre,” said Bill Howard, author of the PC Magazine Guide to Notebook and Laptop Computers (Ziff-Davis Press, Berkeley, Calif.). O.A.G. is the Official Airlines Guides Electronic Edition and Eaasy Sabre is the electronic information service owned by the parent of American Airlines. Another popular electronic airline guide is Worldspan Travelshopper, jointly operated by T.W.A., Northwest and Delta airlines.

O.A.G., Eaasy Sabre and Travelshopper are, in essence, data bases that contain scheduling and fare information on tens of thousands of flights daily. Many business customers subscribe directly to O.A.G. or the other services. Others gain access to the services through such consumer information services as Compuserve, which says it has 903,000 subscribers; the Prodigy Services Company, which reports a million members; Dialog Information Systems Inc.; Delphi; Dow Jones News Retrieval, and M.C.I. Mail.

But while on-line travel services are increasingly accessible, the people who might be expected to use them most — frequent flyers in the computer industry — say it is still faster, easier and cheaper to call a travel agent or the travel provider directly.

“Yes, you can use a computer, and it’s almost as good as the way you’ve done it for the past 20 years, and that’s stupid,” said Jim Seymour, a computer consultant who lives in Austin, Tex. “I use the telephone” and a pocket diary, Mr. Seymour said.

Mr. Howard agreed, and said even skilled computer users find the travel services daunting to navigate.•

Tags: Bill Howard, Douglas Coupland, Jim Seymour, Peter H. Lewis, Steven Sieck

A Brief Note From 1901 About An Older Brother

October 18, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 9, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags: August Schmitt

“[GM] Will ‘Absolutely’ Make Cars For An Age When Human Driving Is Defunct”

October 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Completing driverless cars isn’t exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy but the increasing time and money invested in autonomous will likely lead to a large victory at some indeterminate point in the future. Excerpts follow from two pieces on the topic, the first one about GM going all in on the technology at its Warren Technical Center and the other about automated trucks outperforming human workers in Australia.

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From Alex Davies at Wired:

It’s a fitting locale for this kind of testing: Since 1956, the Eero Saarinen-designed Warren campus has served as the automaker’s main research hub. Since 2009, it’s been the home of the country’s largest battery lab, where GM develops and tests the all-important lithium-ion batteries that power the Volt, and will power the Bolt, the affordable car with 200 miles of electric range it intends to introduce in 2017.

And the Volt is a fitting car for the project: an electrified system makes it easier for engineers to tap into the controls, but more importantly, it’s the most forward-looking car in the GM stable. There’s a reason nearly every autonomous prototype out there is electric: When you’re talking bout one technology of the future, it makes sense to pair it with another.

[CEO Mary] Barra adds a third category: connectivity. “You need embedded connectivity to make autonomous work. And that’s where General Motors has a lead,” with nearly two decades of OnStar-equipped vehicles on the market. It’s moving from there to vehicle to vehicle communication, starting with two Cadillac models next year.

Barra says GM isn’t going to rely on the traditional owner-driver model to keep its business going, and will “absolutely” make cars for an age when human driving is defunct. “We are disrupting ourselves.”•

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From Peter Klinger at Yahoo! News:

Rio Tinto says the use of automated trucks in the Pilbara is outperforming its traditional people-driven fleet by 12 per cent as it ramps up technology deployment in its iron ore business.

Addressing the Nikkei Asia Review Forum in Sydney today, Rio Tinto group executive of technology and information Greg Lilleyman said its Mine of the Future program and “pioneering” collaboration with Japanese manufacturer Komatsu “had helped lead the way in our industry”.

Tesla unveils autopilot cars

Mr Lilleyman, who ran Rio’s Pilbara mines before taking on the Brisbane-based technology role two years ago, credited a decision to seek the input of Japanese suppliers with his company’s ability to lower operating costs, cut capital expenditure and “seize growth opportunities in Asia”.

The Mine of the Future program, which had automated trucks as one of its first targets, has been extended to automated drills, drones and use of big data.•

Tags: Alex Davies, Greg Lilleyman, Mary Barra, Peter Klinger

“We Are Contemplating The Sorts Of Austerities Associated With Wartime Economies”

October 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It is more than a little maddening that Americans freaked out over Ebola, which had very little chance of becoming plague here, yet aren’t a fraction as flustered over a potential catastrophe caused by carbon emissions, a far more likely outcome. Even astoundingly successful capitalist Bill Gates–the sweater-clad, avuncular 2.0 version–has called for serious government curbs on free markets to combat climate change.

In advance of COP 21, Venkatesh Rao has penned an Atlantic piece about the need for a wartime-level approach to reworking the whole of global infrastructure, explaining why it’s possible but not probable to succeed. If death is in the distance but not yet in our faces, are we likely to surrender our luxuries to austerity? Rao acknowledges that a “single cheap and effective solution [could] emerge,” but that’s also not a plausible scenario. An excerpt:

We are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.

What [Bill] Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have.

Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparable magnitude—wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear—only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level of early-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating. Among technological revolutions outside the energy sector, only space exploration, nuclear-weapons technology, and computing technology have had similar levels of bureaucratic direction.

None of these are true comparables, however, for one critical reason. In each historical case, the revolution was highly focused on a single core technology rather than a broad portfolio of technologies, and a managed transition of infrastructure at civilization scale. In the case of aerospace and computing technologies, the comparison is even weaker: Those sectors enjoyed several decades of organic evolution driven primarily by inventors, private investors, and market forces before technocrats got involved.•

Tags: Venkatesh Rao

Old Print Article: Circus Legend George Conklin Recalls His Brilliant Career, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1921)

October 15, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

When he retired from the Big Top, George Conklin, a celebrated animal trainer and all-around circus legend, collaborated with journalist Harvey Woods Root on a book about his career, which began in the raffish, hurly-burly circuit of 1866, carrying on through the more-corporate world of the early twentieth century. Conklin, an odd choice to work with four-legged performers given his phobia about horses, shared some trade secrets (e.g., the “Moss-Haired Girl” used alcohol to manicure her small, flowerless coiffure). The excerpt that follows is from a February 19, 1921 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the volume.

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Tags: George Conklin, Harvey Woods Root

“Some Computer Scientists Rue This Exponential Fallacy”

October 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Overpromising is cruel.

In technology and science, you see it especially in the area of life extension. The fountain of youth has been with us ever since people had time to stop and ponder, but the irrational rhetoric has grown louder since gerontologist Aubrey de Grey said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” What nonsense. I’m all in favor of working toward longer and healthier lives, but there’s no need to overheat the subject.

When it comes to a Singularitarian paradise of conscious machines, Ray Kurzweil’s pronouncements have ranged further and further into science fiction, promising superintelligence in a couple of decades. That’s not happening. Again, working toward such goals is worthwhile, but thinking that tomorrow is today is a sure way to disappoint.

Weak AI (non-conscious machines capable of programmed tasks) is the immediate challenge, with robots primed to devour jobs long handled by humans. That doesn’t mean we endure mass technological unemployment, but it could mean that. In a Nature review of three recent books on the topic (titles by John Markoff + Martin Ford + David A. Mindell), Ken Goldberg takes a skeptical look at our machine overlords. An excerpt:

Rise of the Robots by software entrepreneur Martin Ford proclaims that AI and robots are about to eliminate most jobs, blue- and white-collar. A close reading reveals the evidence as extremely sketchy. Ford has swallowed the rhetoric of futurist Ray Kurzweil, and repeatedly asserts that we are on the brink of vastly accelerating advances based on Moore’s law, which posits that computing power increases exponentially with time. Yet some computer scientists rue this exponential fallacy, arguing that the success of integrated circuits has raised expectations of progress far beyond what historians of technology recognize as an inevitable flattening of the growth curve.

Nor do historical trends support the Luddite fallacy, which assumes that there is a fixed lump of work and that technology inexorably creates unemployment. Such reasoning fails to consider compensation effects that create new jobs, or myriad relevant factors such as globalization and the democratization of the workforce. Ford describes software systems that attempt to do the work of attorneys, project managers, journalists, computer programmers, inventors and musicians. But his evidence that these will soon be perfected and force massive lay-offs consists mostly of popular magazine articles and, in one case, a conversation with the marketing director of a start-up.•

Tags: David A. Mindell, John Markoff, Martin Ford

“Too Bad This Bipartisan Agreement Is Contradicted By The Evidence”

October 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

American drug laws are dumb beyond belief, and apart from selling these substances to children, no one should go to prison for their sale or use. There are more effective (and less-expensive) ways of managing the situation.

While our perplexing “war on drugs” might be silly, it may not be the reason for mass incarceration, a belief echoed resoundingly this political season, even by politicians who were calling for mandatory minimums not too long ago. In a Washington Post editorial, Charles Lane writes of a new study that seems to dispel the myth that our cells are bulging because of nonviolent drug offenders. An excerpt:

At the last Republican debate, on Sept. 16, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina charged that “two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related.” …

Too bad this bipartisan agreement is contradicted by the evidence. Fiorina’s numbers, for example, are exaggerated: In 2014, 46 percent of all state and federal inmates were in for violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault), according to the latest Justice Department data. And this is a conservative estimate, since the definition of violent offense excludes roughly 30,000 federal prisoners, about 16 percent of the total, who are doing time for weapons violations.

Drug offenders account for only 19.5 percent of the total state-federal prison population, most of whom, especially in the federal system, were convicted of dealing drugs such as cocaine, heroin and meth, not “smoking marijuana.”

Undeniably, the population of state prisons (which house the vast majority of offenders) grew from 294,000 in 1980 to 1,362,000 in 2009 — a stunning 363 percent increase — though it has been on a downward trajectory since the latter date.

But only 21 percent of that growth was due to the imprisonment of drug offenders, most of which occurred between 1980 and 1989, not more recently, according to a review of government data reported by Fordham law professor John Pfaff in the Harvard Journal of Legislation. More than half of the overall increase was due to punishment of violent offenses, not drugs, Pfaff reports.•

Tags: Charles Lane

“I Have No Idea How To Get American ‘Back’ To The ‘Pre-Gun’ Condition”

October 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell has written a powerful New Yorker piece about the new abnormal in America of mass violence perpetrated by teenage boys and young men, often at schools. While these acts are a small fraction of U.S. gun violence, they leave deep scars. Gladwell looks for answers at the intersection of developmental disorders, the easy access to weapons and a fatal type of “fan fiction” that has gone viral in the past two decades, with Columbine in 1999 being the shot heard ’round the world.

The article’s most important point, I think, is that there’s no pattern of history among the killers, who come from backgrounds good or bad. What they seem to share is a seemingly inexplicable attraction to spectacles of public violence that have preceded them and provided a modus operandi.

As a dedicated reader of newspapers from the 19th and early-20th century, I can assure you there were always very deeply troubled people in America, probably way more than there are now (per capita, anyhow). They just didn’t have such easy access to guns or at least the type of automatic weapons that exist today, nor were they easily connected to the violent delusions of others.

I don’t see much of a realistic answer for arms control in the long term. The laws should certainly be rewritten to address gun proliferation, but the country is already awash in weapons and with 3D printers coming our way, it will be a tricky battle to win, even without discussing the thorny politics. Similar frustrations are likely in trying to prevent copycat violence among teenage boys, perhaps ones on the autism spectrum, in the Internet Age. For all the good the democratization of media has encouraged, we’re also prone to its dark mirror.

Gladwell conducted a really good Reddit AMA about the subject. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

That was the toughest article I had to get through in a while but that is a testament to your writing style. What do you think are the ways we can fix this culture of violence? Do you think pop culture is to blame?

As a member of the media, what are the steps you can take to stop this kind of problem?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Pop culture is to blame, absolutely. But the issue is that pop culture today is not what it was thirty years ago. The internet has created a rabbit warren for the all sorts of twisted fantasies: the paradox of the internet is that the group who seem to use it the most (teenagers) are those least well-equipped to deal with its pathologies.

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Question:

Mass shootings (and even more so school shootings seem to be the very definition of outliers (1% or less). Why are we focusing on those instead of the 60% of gun deaths that are suicides or 30% that are non-mass homicides? It seems we have it all backwards.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Another very good question. Yes, you are quite right. The magnitude of gun violence in the U.S. is such that school shootings represent a very minor part of the problem. In a logical world, we would be talking way more about the other 99 percent. That said, I think the issue with this particular genre of violence is that it has the potential to spread: that was the point of my article. What began as a problem specific to teens were serious troubles and disorders has now engulfed teenagers who are, for all intents and purposes, normal. That’s scary, because we don’t know where the epidemic will lead.

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Question:

Are you concerned that your article’s focus on autism spectrum disorders as a correlate for schooling shooting behavior plays into the typical distraction of “mental health” we hear about after most mass shootings? America doesn’t have a monopoly on mental illness, but we seem to have one on school shootings.

Relatedly, do you worry that a story like this stigmatizes the mentally ill even further?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Very important question. First of all I was writing about a case in which the subject’s ASD was at the center of his entire legal experience. It was his diagnosis with mild ASD that led to him being put on probation–instead of behind bars. So I had to deal with it. The second half of the piece, which I gather you’ve read, is explicitly about trying to explain how we should NOT confuse John LaDue’s attitudes and condition for those of the classic school shooters, like Eric Harris. That’s why I have the long discussion of “counterfeit deviance”–the notion that we need to be very careful in assessing the criminality of people with ASD when it comes to certain kinds of behaviors: someone like John LaDue might be very innocently drawn into a troubling pattern of behavior. I was trying to fight the tendency to stigmatize those with ASD. I hope that came across.

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Question:

Do you believe that curbing this school attack trend is more a matter of understanding/addressing the psychological condition you describe in the article, or equally or more to do with gun control?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I think that gun control is crucial for lowering the overall homicide rate: there’s no question in my mind that the easy availability of guns in the U.S. is a huge contributor to the fact that we have a homicide rate several times higher than other industrialized nations. But school schooters are a far more complicated issue: they are a subgenre of homicide that is about a specific fantasy that has taken hold of some teenaged boys. We could crack down on guns and still have a Columbine.

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Question:

A lot of people will put these shootings down to sheer ‘craziness’ and they consider them isolated incidents, but here in Ireland we too have ‘crazy’ people and people who aren’t stable, but they don’t have guns so they don’t end up killing people. So surely guns are the problem? Because if you don’t have a gun then you aren’t mobilised to shoot, so this idea of ‘copycats’ you have is really interesting to think about, I couldn’t agree with you more. Excellent article and I look forward to a response!

Malcolm Gladwell:

I couldn’t agree more. Except that I have no idea how to get American “back” to the “pre-gun” condition like Ireland or England or any other Western nation is in. Remember its not just guns that are the issue here. It is the existence of an accompanying powerful fantasy about how they ought to be used.•

Tags: Malcolm Gladwell

A Brief Note From 1901 About A Handsome Girl

October 13, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 17, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags: Miss Jennie Sears

Urban Studies