Urban Studies

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“After The Natural Disaster The Area Wasted No Time In Returning To Its Primeval State”

June 19, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Grantland has many fine writers and reporters, but the twin revelations for me have been Molly Lambert and Alex Pappademas, whom I enjoy reading as much as anyone working at any American publication. The funny thing is, I’m not much into pop culture, which is ostensibly their beat. But as with the best of journalists, the subject they cover most directly is merely an entry into many other ones, long walks that end up in big worlds. 

Excerpts follow from a recent piece by each. In “Start-up Costs,” a look at Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire, Pappademas circles back to Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs, a meditation on the reimagined office space written just before Silicon Valley became fully a brand as well as a land. In Lambert’s “Life Finds a Way,” the release of Jurassic World occasions an exploration of the enduring beauty of decommissioned theme parks–dinosaurs in and of themselves–at the tail end of an entropic state. Both pieces are concerned with an imposition on the natural order of things by capitalism.

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From Pappademas:

Microserfs hit stores in 1995, which turned out to be a pretty big year for Net-this and Net-that. Yahoo, Amazon, and Craigslist were founded; Javascript, the MP3 compression standard, cost-per-click and cost-per-impression advertising, the first “wiki” site, and the Internet Explorer browser were introduced. Netscape went public; Bill Gates wrote the infamous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo to Microsoft executives, proclaiming in the course of 5,000-plus words that the Internet was “the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.” Meanwhile, at any time between May and September, you could walk into a multiplex not yet driven out of business by Netflix and watch a futuristic thriller like Hackers or Johnny Mnemonic or Virtuosity or The Net, movies that capitalized on the culture’s tech obsession as if it were a dance craze, spinning (mostly absurd) visions of the (invariably sinister) ways technology would soon pervade our lives. Microserfs isn’t as hysterical as those movies, and its vision of the coming world is much brighter, but in its own way it’s just as wrongheaded and nailed-to-its-context.

“What is the search for the next great compelling application,” Daniel asks at one point, “but a search for the human identity?” Microserfs argues that the entrepreneurial fantasy of ditching a big corporation to work at a cool start-up with your friends can actually be part of that search — that there’s a way to reinvent work in your own image and according to your own values, that you can find the same transcendence within the sphere of commerce that the slackers in Coupland’s own Generation X4 eschewed McJobs in order to chase. The notion that cutting the corporate cord to work for a start-up often just means busting out of a cubicle in order to shackle oneself to a laptop in a slightly funkier room goes unexamined; the possibility that work within a capitalist system, no matter how creative and freeform and unlike what your parents did, might be fundamentally incompatible with self-actualization and spiritual fulfillment is not on the table.•

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Lambert’s opening:

I drove out to the abandoned amusement park originally called Jazzland during a trip to New Orleans earlier this year. Jazzland opened in 2000, was rebranded as Six Flags New Orleans in 2003, and was damaged beyond repair a decade ago by the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina. But in the years since it’s been closed, it has undergone a rebirth as a filming location. It serves as the setting for the new Jurassic World. As I approached the former Jazzland by car, a large roller coaster arced into view. The park, just off Interstate 10, was built on muddy swampland. I have read accounts on urban exploring websites by people who’ve sneaked into the park that say it’s overrun with alligators and snakes.

After the natural disaster the area wasted no time in returning to its primeval state: a genuine Jurassic World. It was in the Jurassic era when crocodylia became aquatic animals, beginning to resemble the alligators currently populating Jazzland. I saw birds of prey circling over the theme park as I reached the front gates, only to be told in no uncertain terms that the site is closed to outsiders. I pleaded with the security guard that I am a journalist just looking for a location manager to talk to, but was forbidden from driving past the very first entrance into the parking lot. I could see the ticket stands and Ferris wheel, but accepted my fate and drove away, knowing I’d have to wait for Jurassic World to see Jazzland. As I drove off the premises, I could still glimpse the tops of the coasters and Ferris wheel, obscured by trees.

I am fascinated by theme parks that return to nature, since the idea of a theme park is such an imposition on nature to begin with — an obsessively ordered attempt to overrule reality by providing an alternate, superior dimension.•

 

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“She Also Imagines Using Living Organisms Such As Bacteria, Algae And Jellyfish As Building Materials”

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

Rachel Armstrong, a medical doctor who became an architect, wants to combine her twin passions, believing buildings can be created not only from plastics recovered from our waterways but also biological materials. From Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star:

She also imagines using living organisms such as bacteria, algae and jellyfish as building materials. If that sounds far-fetched, consider the BIQ (Bio Intelligent Quotient) Building in Hamburg. Its windows are filled with water in which live algae that’s fed nutrients. When the sun comes out, the micro-organisms reproduce, raising the temperature of the water. BIQ residents say they love their new digs. It helps that they have no heating bills.

Armstrong then described how objects can be made of plastic dredged from the oceans. It could, she suggested, be a new source of material as well as a way to clean degraded waterways. Her basic desire is to make machinery more biological and unravel the machinery behind the biological. That means figuring out how bacteria talks to bacteria, how algae “communicate.” This isn’t new, of course, but this fusion draws closer all the time.

As that happens, she argues, “consumers can become producers.” In the meantime, the search for “evidence-based truth-seeking systems” continues.

Armstrong, who began her professional life as a doctor, credits her interest in architecture to the time she spent at a leper colony in India in the early ’90s. “What I saw was a different way of life,” she recalls. “I realized we need a more integrated way of being and living so we are at one with our surroundings.”•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 18, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Have someone staying in your home and you want out? Well today’s the day. See I smell terrible all the time. Have me around for a bit and they are sure to want to leave. Really this will work. I want in return iPads, laptops, cash, gold, cash. Email for more info.

“Who Really Cares About The Internet When One Considers Clean Water And Flushing Toilets?”

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

In a Foreign Affairs essay, Martin Wolf has a retort for techno-optimists, contending that wearables are merely the emperor’s new clothes. One of his arguments I’m curious about concerns the statistical evidence that output per worker has recently decreased. How, exactly, does automation fit into that equation? Technology would seem to only improve productivity among workers if it’s complementing, not replacing, them. I do think Wolf makes a great case that “unmeasured value” has been a big part of life long before the Internet. The phonograph, after all, couldn’t be any more fully measured than the iPod. An excerpt:

…the pace of economic and social transformation has slowed in recent decades, not accelerated. This is most clearly shown in the rate of growth of output per worker. The economist Robert Gordon, doyen of the skeptics, has noted that the average growth of U.S. output per worker was 2.3 percent a year between 1891 and 1972. Thereafter, it only matched that rate briefly, between 1996 and 2004. It was just 1.4 percent a year between 1972 and 1996 and 1.3 percent between 2004 and 2012.

On the basis of these data, the age of rapid productivity growth in the world’s frontier economy is firmly in the past, with only a brief upward blip when the Internet, e-mail, and e-commerce made their initial impact.

Those whom Gordon calls “techno-optimists”—Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example—respond that the GDP statistics omit the enormous unmeasured value provided by the free entertainment and information available on the Internet. They emphasize the plethora of cheap or free services (Skype, Wikipedia), the scale of do-it-yourself entertainment (Facebook), and the failure to account fully for all the new products and services. Techno-optimists point out that before June 2007, an iPhone was out of reach for even the richest man on earth. Its price was infinite. The fall from an infinite to a definite price is not reflected in the price indexes. Moreover, say the techno-optimists, the “consumer surplus” in digital products and services—the difference between the price and the value to consumers—is huge. Finally, they argue, measures of GDP underestimate investment in intangible assets.

These points are correct. But they are nothing new: all of this has repeatedly been true since the nineteenth century. Indeed, past innovations generated vastly greater unmeasured value than the relatively trivial innovations of today. Just consider the shift from a world without telephones to one with them, or from a world of oil lamps to one with electric light. Next to that, who cares about Facebook or the iPad? Indeed, who really cares about the Internet when one considers clean water and flushing toilets?•

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A Brief Note From 1929 About Eye Tattoos

June 17, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 17, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Robots And Humans Can Augment And Complement Each Other’s Skills”

June 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you’re looking for an optimistic rejoinder to the concern about mass technological unemployment, there’s “The Robots Are Coming,” a Foreign Affairs piece by MIT computer scientist Daniela Rus that looks at the future through rose-colored Google Glasses. Rus believes driverless cars and robotic assistants will be potent elements of the economy soon enough–something those who worry about automation concur with–but her contention is that these machines will co-exist with workers instead of replacing them and even create many new jobs. I doubt the former but the latter is certainly possible. 

The writer sees a future in which “people may wake up in the morning and send personal-shopping robots to the supermarket to bring back fruit and milk for breakfast.” Rus offers no precise timeframe for when these silicon servants will begin appearing, which is probably wise.

The opening:

Robots have the potential to greatly improve the quality of our lives at home, at work, and at play. Customized robots working alongside people will create new jobs, improve the quality of existing jobs, and give people more time to focus on what they find interesting, important, and exciting. Commuting to work in driverless cars will allow people to read, reply to e-mails, watch videos, and even nap. After dropping off one passenger, a driverless car will pick up its next rider, coordinating with the other self-driving cars in a system designed to minimize traffic and wait times—and all the while driving more safely and efficiently than humans.

Yet the objective of robotics is not to replace humans by mechanizing and automating tasks; it is to find ways for machines to assist and collaborate with humans more effectively. Robots are better than humans at crunching numbers, lifting heavy objects, and, in certain contexts, moving with precision. Humans are better than robots at abstraction, generalization, and creative thinking, thanks to their ability to reason, draw from prior experience, and imagine. By working together, robots and humans can augment and complement each other’s skills.

Still, there are significant gaps between where robots are today and the promise of a future era of “pervasive robotics,” when robots will be integrated into the fabric of daily life, becoming as common as computers and smartphones are today, performing many specialized tasks, and often operating side by side with humans. Current research aims to improve the way robots are made, how they move themselves and manipulate objects, how they reason, how they perceive their environments, and how they cooperate with one another and with humans.

Creating a world of pervasive, customized robots is a major challenge, but its scope is not unlike that of the problem computer scientists faced nearly three decades ago, when they dreamed of a world where computers would become integral parts of human societies. In the words of Mark Weiser, a chief scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1990s, who is considered the father of so-called ubiquitous computing: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Computers have already achieved that kind of ubiquity. In the future, robots will, too.•

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“The Premium Car Service Removes The Racism Factor When You Need A Ride”

June 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Uber isn’t good for Labor, no matter how much Travis Kalanick tries to convince us, but the company and other rideshares might be a boon in other ways beyond useful technological innovations. I argued last year that these services could provide options to those who’ve traditionally been shortchanged by predatory and racist taxi drivers. Of course, bigotry is a deep and enduring wound, and the digital realm isn’t impervious to it.

From Jenna Wortham’s smart Medium essay “Ubering While Black“:

I’ve endured humiliating experiences trying to get a cab in the various cities I’ve visited and lived in. Available taxis—as indicated by their roof lights—locked their doors with embarrassingly loud clicks as I approached. Or they’ve just ignored my hail altogether. It’s largely illegal for cab drivers to refuse a fare, but that rarely deters them, because who’s going to take the time to file a report? And once, horrifyingly, while I was in San Francisco, a taxi driver demanded I exit his car. Fed up, I stubbornly refused, so he hopped out of his seat, walked around to my side, and yanked me out.

After that last incident, which happened a few years ago, I avoided cabs altogether. I stuck to riding public transportation, and rented cars when I traveled.

In 2011, I covered Uber’s debut in New York. The service, then a scrappy start-up, promised to let people request rides from private cars and taxis with a smartphone application. It initially seemed like a hard sell in a city resplendent with transit options, but I quickly found myself using it more frequently, especially when I traveled back to San Francisco.

Latoya Peterson, the founder of a site called Racialicious, first blogged about her experiences with Uber in 2012, wondering whether or not the technology could be a panacea for the discrimination she experienced trying to hail cabs.

“The premium car service removes the racism factor when you need a ride,” she wrote. Peterson, who lives in D.C., said that since her original post, she has taken “hundreds of rides” with Uber. “The Uber experience is just so much easier for African-Americans,” she told me recently. “There’s no fighting or conversation. When I need a car, it comes. It takes me to my destination. It’s amazing that I have to pay a premium for that experience, but it’s worth it.”

Even though requesting a car through Uber can cost more than a regular taxi, Peterson and I are each usually willing to pay extra to avoid potential humiliation.•

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“It’s The Things We Don’t Even Expect That Will Happen Really Fast”

June 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Online videos exploded because the Youtube founders didn’t wait for legislation to catch up to technology and just went ahead with their plans. That’s led to great things and bad things for content. Google similarly began testing driverless cars on public streets before laws were established governing them. It’s difficult to believe at this point that any auto (or auto-software) manufacturer, in Detroit or Silicon Valley, would risk flouting the growing legislation in regards to driverless. But other transportation innovations will arrive at a surprisingly brisk pace because laws haven’t yet anticipated them.

From “Tipping Point in Transit” by Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times:

Communication systems and sensors installed in streets and cars are creating the possibility of intelligent roads, while newer energy systems like solar power are altering the environmental costs of getting around. Technology is also creating new transportation options for short distances, like energy-efficient electric-powered bikes and scooters, or motorcycles that can’t tip over.

“Cars and transportation will change more in the next 20 years than they’ve changed in the last 75 years,” said M. Bart Herring, the head of product management at Mercedes-Benz USA. “What we were doing 10 years ago wasn’t that much different from what we were doing 50 years ago. The cars got more comfortable, but for the most part we were putting gas in the cars and going where we wanted to go. What’s going to happen in the next 20 years is the equivalent of the moon landing.”

Mr. Herring is one of many in the industry who say that we are on the verge of a tipping point in transportation. Soon, getting around may be cheaper and more convenient than it is today, and possibly safer and more environmentally friendly, too.

But the transportation system of the near future may also be more legally complex and, given the increasing use of private systems to get around, more socially unequal. And, as in much of the rest of the tech industry, the moves toward tomorrow’s transportation system may be occurring more rapidly than regulators and social norms can adjust to them.

“All the things that we think will happen tomorrow, like fully autonomous cars, may take a very long time,” said Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies emerging transportation systems. “But it’s the things we don’t even expect that will happen really fast.”•

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“The Robots Are Dancing”

June 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The near-term future of automation isn’t dramatic like the new Channel 4-AMC show Humans. There’ll be no Uncanny Valley to disorient us, just a downward slope. No struggle for dominance–it’s been decided. Tomorrow won’t look unsettlingly sort of like you and me. It will look nothing like us at all.

An entire team of Australian dockworkers has been disappeared by machines in the last two months. From Jacob Saulwick at the Sydney Morning Herald:

At Sydney’s Port Botany, every hour of every day, the robots are dancing.

Well, they look like they are dancing – these 45 so-called AutoStrads, or automated straddles, machines that have taken on the work that until a couple of months ago was at least in part performed by dockworkers.

Almost 20 years ago, the Patrick container terminal at Botany played host to one of the most divisive industrial battles in Australian history, as the stevedoring company attempted to break the back of its union-dominated workforce.

In some respects that battle was won in April.

It was then that Patrick introduced, following a four-year investment program, a level of automation into its stevedoring operation that might be unsurpassed in the world.

“This is fully automated, there are no human beings, literally from the moment this truck driver stepped out of his cabin from then onwards this AutoStrad will take it right through the quay line without any humans interfacing at all,” Alistair Field, the managing director of Patrick Terminals and Logistics, a division of Asciano, said on Wednesday.•

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Old Print Article: “Let The People Be Clean,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1897)

June 16, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

People in Brooklyn in the late-nineteenth century apparently stunk to the high heavens, and everyone was close to fainting from the funk. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle offered a solution for the cleansing of filthy citizens in the most demeaning, insulting terms in an August 13, 1897 article: Build some public baths, so the miserable scumbags could be less stanky.

“He Has Begun Worrying About Something That Would Have Been Unimaginable To Him A Few Years Ago”

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

Hod Lipson loves robots, but love is complicated. 

The robotics engineer is among the growing chorus of those concerned about technological unemployment leading to social unrest, something Norbert Wiener warned of more than 60 years ago. Is it, at long last, in this Digital Age, happening?

In a long-form MIT Technology Review article, David Rotman wonders if the new technologies may be contributing to wealth inequality and could ultimately lead to an even a greater divide, while considering the work of analysts on both sides of automation issue, including Sir Tony Atkinson, Martin Ford, Andrew McAfee and David Autor. The opening:

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he’s moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics. His research projects provide a peek into the intriguing possibilities of machines and automation, from robots that “evolve” to ones that assemble themselves out of basic building blocks. (His Cornell colleagues are building robots that can serve as baristas and kitchen help.) A few years ago, Lipson demonstrated an algorithm that explained experimental data by formulating new scientific laws, which were consistent with ones known to be true. He had automated scientific discovery.

Lipson’s vision of the future is one in which machines and software possess abilities that were unthinkable until recently. But he has begun worrying about something else that would have been unimaginable to him a few years ago. Could the rapid advances in automation and digital technology provoke social upheaval by eliminating the livelihoods of many people, even as they produce great wealth for others?

“More and more computer-guided automation is creeping into everything from manufacturing to decision making,” says Lipson. In the last two years alone, he says, the development of so-called deep learning has triggered a revolution in artificial intelligence, and 3-D printing has begun to change industrial production processes. “For a long time the common understanding was that technology was destroying jobs but also creating new and better ones,” says Lipson. “Now the evidence is that technology is destroying jobs and indeed creating new and better ones but also fewer ones. It is something we as technologists need to start thinking about.”•

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“It’s So Utterly Beyond The Bounds Of Anyone’s Imagination”

June 15, 2015 in Books, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Before it became apparent that Geraldo Rivera really just wanted to give the whole world a free mustache ride, he was a respected, muckraking journalist who filmed a sensational and righteous report about abuses at Willowbrook. He instantly became a national name and soon had other opportunities, including a really good if sporadic 1973-75 late-night talk show, Good Night America.

In a summer 1974 episode, he spoke to someone I’m fascinated with in Clifford Irving, who’d written a 1969 book about art forger Elmyr De Hory before bringing out another volume in 1972, one in which he pretended that the reclusive Howard Hughes had collaborated with him on an autobiography. McGraw-Hill took the bait and gave him a boatload of cash for the “exclusive,” but the Hughes ruse was soon exposed. Irving was operating in an era when people still distinguished between fact and fiction, so his career went into a Dumpster for awhile.

Orson Welles, an infamous hoaxer himself, made a brilliant, serendipitous cine-essay, F Is for Fake, about the scandal as it unfolded, and Irving was grilled at the time by everyone from Mike Wallace to Abbie Hoffman. In a marriage-themed show, Geraldo speaks to Irving and his wife Edith about the toll on their relationship caused by the fraud’s fallout, which included prison sentences for them both. (They had just been released on parole when this program was filmed.)

The host also speaks to Sly and Kathy Stone about their wedding ceremony in front of more than 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden and shows footage of the event. The final segment is with comedian Robert Klein and his then-spouse, the opera singer Brenda Boozer. Loathsome Henny Youngman is the guest announcer, serving up Zsa Zsa Gabor jokes. Holy Mother of God! Watch it here.•

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A Brief Note From 1907 About A Cactus Diet

June 15, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the December 15, 1907 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

“We Can Create New Businesses That I Call ‘Choice Engines'”

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

More information readily available to us–more than we ever dreamed we could possess–has not clearly improved our decision-making process. Why? Perhaps, like Chauncey Gardener, we like to watch, but what we really love is to see what we want to see. Or maybe we just can’t assimilate the endless reams of virtual data.

In an Ask Me Anything at Reddit, behavioral economist Richard Thaler, who’s just published Misbehaving, has an interesting idea: What about online decision engines that help with practical problems the way Expedia does with travel itineraries? Not something feckless like the former Ask Jeeves, but a machine wiser and deeper.

Such a nudge would bring about all sorts of ethical questions. Should we be offloading decisions (or even a significant part of them) to algorithms? Are the people writing the coding manipulating us? But it would be a fascinating experiment. 

The exchange:

Question:

Do you think, with rapid advances in data collection, machine learning, ubiquity of technology that lowers barrier for precise calculation/ data interpretation etc, consumers/ humans will start to behave more like Econs? Do you think that would be OPTIMAL, i.e in our best interests? It seems a big ‘flaw’ in AI/ robotics right now is that they are not ‘human like,’ i.e. they are too much like Econs, they make no mistakes and always make optimal choices. Do you think it’s more optimal for human to become more like robots/ machine that make no ‘irrational’ errors? Do you think it would eventually become that way when technology makes it much lower efforts to actually evaluate rather than rely on intuitive heuristics?

Richard Thaler:

Two parts to this.

One is: I’ve long advocated using big data to help people make better decisions, an effort i call “smart disclosure.” I’ve a couple of New York Times columns devoted to this topic. The idea is that by making better data available, we can create new businesses that I call “choice engines.”

Think of them like travel websites, that would make, say, choosing a mortgage as easy as finding a plane ticket from New York to Chicago.

More generally, however, the goal is not to turn humans into Econs. Econs (*not economists) are jerks.

Econs don’t leave tips at restaurants they never intend to go back to. Don’t contribute to NPR. And don’t bother to vote.•

 

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“The Next Neat Thing That’s Going To Happen Is Cloud Robotics”

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

The DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004 quickly resulted in private companies investing heavily in driverless. Will the department’s recently completed Robotics Challenge lead to a similar public-to private shift? Gill Pratt, outgoing member of DARPA, explains to Sam Thielman of Guardian how he believes that will occur. An excerpt:

Question:

Google, Daimler and Uber all have self-driving cars now; how do you anticipate humanoid robots reaching the private sector?

Gill Pratt:

I think the next big thing to conquer is cost. All the prototypes that you saw were in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. And once a market is identified, whether it’s in manufacturing or agriculture or ageing society, once someone kind of finds the match between the technology and the market, the costs will go way down, and that will be an amazing thing. The next neat thing that’s going to happen is cloud robotics: that’s where when one robot learns something they all learn something.

Let’s say you have a group of robots used for ageing society and their job is to clean up within your house. As each machine does its work, eventually one of them will come across an object and not know what it is, and it’ll reach out to the cloud, through the internet, and say: “Does anyone know what this thing is?” Let’s say that no one does. Then it’ll reach out to a person and the person will say: “Oh, that’s a jar of oil, and that belongs in the cupboard next to the jar of vinegar.” And the robot will say: “Got it!” And now every single one of them knows. In this way, you can bootstrap up the confidence of all the machines throughout the world. I think that will be the next technology.•

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Old Print Article: “Skeleton All That Remains Of Army’s Camel ‘Cavalry'” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1920)

June 14, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Camels are mostly associated with other parts of the world, but they originated in what we today call the United States of America. In the 1850s, Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, thought the desert animals might be useful for military purposes, scouting expeditions and as beasts of burden transporting goods and water across the Southwest, so he ordered a couple shiploads of camels to be purchased abroad and delivered to Texas. An article in the October 17, 1920 recalled the effort, which ultimately failed for several reasons, including that little thing called the Civil War.

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“The Revolution Will Be Modular”

June 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A system based on prefabricated modules has allowed Zhang Yue to construct skyscrapers in heretofore unimaginably quick times. They might not be beautiful, but they are green and relatively inexpensive. As the buildings grow taller, the developer’s dreams grow wider. From Finn Aberdein at the BBC:

The revolution will be modular, Zhang insists. Mini Sky City was assembled from thousands of factory-made steel modules, slotted together like Meccano.

It’s a method he says is not only fast, but also safe and cheap.

Now he wants to drop the “Mini” and use the same technique to build the world’s tallest skyscraper, Sky City.

While the current record holder, the 828m-high Burj Khalifa in Dubai, took five years to “top out”, Zhang says his proposed 220-storey “vertical city” will take only seven months – four for the foundations, and three for the tower itself.

And it will be 10m taller.

But if that was not enough, Zhang Yue wants nothing less than to reimagine the whole urban environment.

He has a vision of a future where his company makes a third of the world’s buildings – all modular, all steel, and all green.

“The biggest problem we face in the world right now isn’t terrorism or world war. It’s climate change,” he says.•

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“Humanoid Robots Are Not Yet At The Ready-For-Take-Off Point”

June 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As I stated recently, humanoid robots aren’t likely to experience the head-spinning progress driverless cars have enjoyed because they’re more complicated machines that need to move in every direction, not just forward and reverse, and they require smart limbs as well as rolling wheels. But having numerous multibillion dollar corporations working on these hard problems is also an incredible force for improvement.

An Economist report of the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge notes the promise but also the frustrations of the field:

Running Man, the Atlas robot with which IHMC won second place, showed what the platform was capable of—though after completing its winning round it did rather let the side down by falling over as it struck a sequence of victorious poses. Jerry Pratt, who led the IHMC team, argues convincingly that, in principle, walking has huge advantages—a human can quite easily make progress along a discontinuous track no wider than a single foot, taking in its stride obstacles big enough to pose a problem to the wheels of anything short of a monster truck. But on the evidence of the DRC, the software and hardware needed to match that ability remain far off. For the time being, a robot designed for responding to DRC-style disasters looks likely to need an alternative to legs.

Getting a handle on how long that time being might be was another of the points of the DRC. Gill Pratt, who ran the programme at DARPA (and is no relation to IHMC’s Mr Pratt, though he did supervise his doctoral research) saw it as a way not just to stimulate progress in the field but also to gauge how quickly such progress could be made. Everyone involved in the DRC remembers the startling improvement between the first of DARPA’s “Grand Challenges” for autonomous vehicles—which, in 2004, saw the winning car travel just 11.8km of a 240km route—and the second, in 2005, in which five teams went the whole distance. That demonstration of rapidly expanding capabilities played a role in convincing people, such as the bosses of Google, that self-driving cars were a practical possibility in the not-too-distant future.

The progress between the first real-world DRC trials, in late 2013, and the finals this month was less spectacular. Humanoid robots are not yet at the ready-for-take-off point autonomous cars were at ten years ago. The teams using the Atlases knew that less than two years of working with their charges gave them time to implement little more than a simple ability to walk—one expert says that developing robust locomotion from the ground up and debugging it is more like a five-year job. There were also limitations with the hardware. Atlas’s arms were not strong enough to lift its 150kg bulk back up if it fell down.•

“The Experiment Found That Total Conformity Was Scarcer Than Total Independence”

June 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

While it shocks me that test subjects in psychologist Solomon Asch’s experiments on conformity were at all swayed to ridiculous conclusions by groupthink, economist Tim Harford finds a silver lining in the cloud in his latest Financial Times column: Participants were independent more often than influenced. That’s true, but if a few minutes of suggestion can alter beliefs to a significant degree, what can longer term and more subtle social pressures do?

From Harford:

Asch gave his subjects the following task: identify which of three different lines, A, B or C, was the same length as a “standard” line. The task was easy in its own right but there was a twist. Each individual was in a group of seven to nine people, and everyone else in the group was a confederate of Asch’s. For 12 out of 18 questions they had been told to choose, unanimously, a specific incorrect answer. Would the experimental subject respond by fitting in with the group or by contradicting them? Many of us know the answer: we are swayed by group pressure. Offered a choice between speaking the truth and saying something socially convenient, we opt for social convenience every time.

But wait — “every time”? In popular accounts of Asch’s work, conformity tends to be taken for granted. I often describe his research myself in speeches as an example of how easily groupthink can set in and silence dissent. And this is what students of psychology are themselves told by their own textbooks. A survey of these textbooks by three psychologists, Ronald Friend, Yvonne Rafferty and Dana Bramel, found that the texts typically emphasised Asch’s findings of conformity. That was in 1990 but when Friend recently updated his work, he found that today’s textbooks stressed conformity more than ever.

This is odd, because the experiments found something more subtle. It is true that most experimental subjects were somewhat swayed by the group. Fewer than a quarter of experimental subjects resolutely chose the correct line every time. (In a control group, unaffected by social pressure, errors were rare.) However, the experiment found that total conformity was scarcer than total independence. Only six out of 123 subjects conformed on all 12 occasions. More than half of the experimental subjects defied the group and gave the correct answer at least nine times out of 12. A conformity effect certainly existed but it was partial.•

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An iteration of the Asch Experiment:

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A Brief Note From 1902 About A Blown Nose

June 12, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 30, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Here At DARPA We Don’t Do Science For Science’s Sake”

June 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Among other things, Matt Novak’s Paleofuture dispatch from the DARPA Robotics Challenge explains why technology associated with the agency–the Internet, driverless cars–usually pans out even if it initially seems outré. That something to consider since it has more than a passing interest in robotic warfare. An excerpt:

If DARPA has an interest in any particular technology, there’s a reasonable chance that it’ll be a practical reality within your lifetime. DARPA specializes in “high risk, high reward” research and development, which means that it’s pushing the limits of what’s possible. But DARPA isn’t interested in dicking around with impractical nonsense. Or anything that doesn’t have applications that contribute to national defense. “Here at DARPA we don’t do science for science’s sake,” Steven Walker, deputy director of DARPA, says in a video at the expo. Walker goes on to explain that one of the reasons DARPA was created was to create “technological surprise.”

The agency was founded in 1958 (then known as ARPA) on the heels of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into orbit. It was a national embarrassment for the United States — especially the Cold Warriors who insisted that American style capitalism would produce the best goods, services, and technologies. So the Eisenhower administration decided that it wouldn’t be surprised again.

Just one of many technologies developed by DARPA is the driverless car. Americans have been waiting on the fully automated driverless car for decades. In fact, scifi visions of the driverless car are nearly as old as the automobile itself. And with each passing day, we inch closer and closer to driverless cars becoming a mainstream reality on America’s roads.

Today we associate companies like Google with driverless car development. But DARPA has been working on driverless cars since before Google even existed.•

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Old Print Article: “Annie Peck Triumphs, Climbs Highest Peak,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1903)

June 11, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite choosing the dangerous profession of mountain climber, Annie Smith Peck somehow made it to the end of her life in one piece, even surviving accidents involving street cars and mules. The apex of her adventurous career was probably her 1903 ascent of Illampu in Bolivia, which she made with geologist Dr. W.G. Tight and two guides, a treacherous scaling reported on in the September 2, 1903 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“It Won’t Be An Encounter, Or Even A Conquest. It Will Be A Gold Rush.”

June 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Private enterprise endeavoring to start a new Space Race isn’t merely about cashing in–it’s also about the survival of a variant of our species–but the rich asteroid belt near Mars has certainly caught the attention of billionaire explorers. We want to mine up there to build new colonies but perhaps they’ll be a little something left over so that our first trillionaire can be minted. It would be the least pleasing result of space exploration, but it’s undoubtedly a driving force.

Sometimes during a gold rush people lose their manners. It’s important then to begin thinking now about how we’ll treat our hosts, whether they be microbial or what have you. At Aeon, Lizzie Wade has written a smart essay about what could become a next-level land grab–Manifest Destiny meeting Space Odyssey. She suggests that perhaps the Antarctic Treaty System could be used as a template for curbing our worst impulses. An excerpt:

There are two forms the discovery of alien life could realistically take, neither of them a culture clash between civilisations. The first is finding a ‘biosignature’ of, say, oxygen, in the atmosphere of an expolanet, created by life on the exoplanet’s surface. This kind of long-distance discovery of alien life, which astronomers are already scanning for, is the most likely contact scenario, since it doesn’t require us going anywhere, or even sending a robot. But its consequences will be purely theoretical. At long last we’ll know we’re not alone, but that’s about it. We won’t be able to establish contact, much less meet our counterparts – for a very long time, if ever. We’d reboot scientific, philosophical and religious debates about how we fit into a biologically rich universe, and complicate our intellectual and moral stances in previously unimaginable ways. But any ethical questions would concern only us and our place in the Universe.

‘First contact’ will not be a back-and-forth between equals, but like the discovery of a natural resource
If, on the other hand, we discover microbial or otherwise non-sentient life within our own solar system – logistics will be on our side. We’d be able to visit within a reasonable period of time (as far as space travel goes), and I hope we’d want to. If the life we find resembles plants, their complexity will wow us. Most likely we’ll find simple single-celled microbes or maybe – maybe – something like sponges or tubeworms. In terms of encounter, we’d be making all the decisions about how to proceed.

None of this eliminates the possibility that alien life might discover us. But if NASA’s current timeline holds water, another civilisation has only a few more decades to get here before we claim the mantle of ‘discoverer’ rather than ‘discovered’. With every passing day, it grows more likely that ‘first contact’ will not take the form of an intellectual or moral back-and-forth between equals. It will be more like the discovery of a natural resource, and one we might be able to exploit. It won’t be an encounter, or even a conquest. It will be a gold rush.

This makes defining an ethics of contact necessary now, before we have to put it into practice.•

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“The Only Real Barrier To The Immediate Adoption Of Self-Driven Trucks Is Purely Legal”

June 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not easy for driverless cars to navigate tiny side streets that are barely mapped. Autos will have to communicate with one another, sharing information about unplanned detours and such. But that’s something corporate trucking need not worry about, its vehicles transporting via highways. As Scott Santens points out at Quartz, many of the nearly nine million workers in the sector could be unemployed as soon as it’s legally allowed. The technology is already there. An excerpt:

Any realistic time horizon for self-driving trucks needs to look at horizons for cars and shift those even further towards the present. Trucks only need to be self-driven on highways. They do not need warehouse-to-store autonomy to be disruptive. City-to-city is sufficient. At the same time, trucks are almost entirely corporate driven. There are market forces above and beyond private cars operating for trucks. If there are savings to be found in eliminating truckers from drivers seats—which there are—these savings will be sought. It’s actually really easy to find these savings right now.

Wirelessly linked truck platoons are as simple as having a human driver drive a truck, with multiple trucks without drivers following closely behind. This not only saves on gas money (7% for only two trucks together), but can immediately eliminate half of all truckers if, for example, two-truck convoys became the norm. There’s no real technical obstacles to this option. It’s a very simple use of present technology.

Basically, the only real barrier to the immediate adoption of self-driven trucks is purely legal in nature, not technical or economic. With self-driving vehicles currently only road legal in a few states, many more states need to follow suit unless autonomous vehicles are made legal at the national level. And Sergey Brin of Google has estimated this could happen as soon as 2017. Therefore…

The answer to the big question of “When?” for self-driving trucks is that they can essentially hit our economy at any time.•

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“Unprecedented Technological Change Is Going To Enable Cities To Be More Efficient”

June 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Google, the search AI company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has brought aboard Dan Doctoroff, who was not universally loved in New York City when serving as the Balbo to Bloomberg’s Mussolini, as the leader of Sidewalk Labs, which aims to reimagine and reorganize urban areas with technology. Interesting that Google recently has hired not only Doctoroff but also Ray Kurzweil, both of whom are Methuselah-esque compared to the average Silicon Valley employee. Perhaps it’s a new market inefficiency? Or maybe when you’re immortal like Kurzweil, 67 years old is toddler age?

From Miguel Helft at Forbes:

In a press release on its own site, Sidewalk Labs, which is based in New York, said:

While there are apps to tell people about traffic conditions, or the prices of available apartments, the biggest challenges that cities face — such as making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy usage and helping government operate more efficiently have, so far, been more difficult to address. Sidewalk Labs will develop new products, platforms and partnerships to make progress in these areas.

“At a time when the concerns about urban equity, costs, health and the environment are intensifying, unprecedented technological change is going to enable cities to be more efficient, responsive, flexible and resilient,” Doctoroff wrote in the press release. “We hope that Sidewalk will play a major role in developing technology products, platforms and advanced infrastructure that can be implemented at scale in cities around the world.”

Page credited Googler Adrian Aoun with bringing Doctoroff on board. Aoun, an entrepreneur who sold his last company, Wavii, to Google, has been working on special projects at the company. On his Facebook page, Aoun wrote: “I’m proud to announce a project I’ve been working on, Sidewalk Labs, with my good friend Dan Doctoroff!”•

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