Urban Studies

You are currently browsing the archive for the Urban Studies category.

“They Often Represent Alternatives To US-Based Jobs”

November 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The unemployment rate is falling in America, but wages aren’t rising in most sectors, which is counterintuitive. Two explanatory notes about U.S. employment in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse, one from Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, and the other from Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article “The Rise of Invisible Unemployment.”

____________________________

From Brynjolfsson and McAfee:

“A few years ago we had a very candid discussion with one CEO, and he explained that he knew for over a decade that advances in information technology had rendered many routine information-processing jobs superfluous. At the same time, when profits and revenues are on the rise, it can be hard to eliminate jobs. When the recession came, business as usual obviously was not sustainable, which made it easier to implement a round of streamlining and layoffs. As the recession ended and profits and demand returned, the jobs doing routine work were not restored. Like so many other companies in recent years, his organization found it could use technology to scale up without the workers.”

____________________________

From Thompson:

“3. The rise of invisible work is too large to ignore.

By ‘invisible work,’ I mean work done by American companies that isn’t done by Americans workers. Globalization and technology is allowing corporations to expand productivity, which shows up in earnings reports and stock prices and other metrics that analysts typically associate with a healthy economy. But globalization and technology don’t always show up in US wage growth because they often represent alternatives to US-based jobs. Corporations have used the recession and the recovery to increase profits by expanding abroad, hiring abroad, and controlling labor costs at home. It’s a brilliant strategy to please investors. But it’s an awful way to contribute to domestic wage growth.“•

Tags: , ,

Old Print Articles: William James Sidis, Prodigy Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1910/44)

November 9, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

First William James Sidis amazed the world, then he disappointed it.

A Harvard student in 1910 at just 11 years old, he was considered the most astounding prodigy of early 20th-century America, a genius of mathematics and much more, reading at two and typing at three, who had been trained methodically from birth by his father, a psychiatrist and professor. It was a lot to live up to. There was a dalliance with radical politics at the end of his teens that threw him off the path to greatness, resulting in a sedition trial. In the aftermath, he quietly disappeared into an undistinguished life.

When it was learned in 1937 that Sidis was living a threadbare existence of no great import, merely a clerk, he was treated to a public accounting which was laced with no small amount of schadenfreude. He sued the New Yorker over an article by Gerald L. Manley and James Thurber (gated) which detailed his failed promise. He was paid $3,000 to settle the case by the magazine’s publishers just prior to his death in 1944.

Two articles follow from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about Sidis’ uncommon life.

_______________________________

From the March 20, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

From the July 18, 1944 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

Tags: ,

“The World Is A Very Unequal Place”

November 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A more extreme way of looking at wealth inequality is not within nations but among them. In a Financial Times piece, Tim Harford argues the biggest lottery to win in life isn’t genetics or parentage but a fortunate patch of the map. An excerpt:

“I’ve been a lucky boy. I could start with the ‘boy’ fact. We men enjoy all sorts of privileges, many of them quite subtle these days, but well worth having. I’m white. I’m an Oxford graduate and I am the son of Oxbridge graduates….

Imagine lining up everyone in the world from the poorest to the richest, each standing beside a pile of money that represents his or her annual income. The world is a very unequal place: those in the top 1 per cent have vastly more than those in the bottom 1 per cent – you need about $35,000 after taxes to make that cut-off and be one of the 70 million richest people in the world. If that seems low, it’s $140,000 after taxes for a family of four – and it is also about 100 times more than the world’s poorest people have.

What determines who is at the richer end of that curve is, mostly, living in a rich country. Branko Milanovic, a visiting presidential professor at City University New York and author of The Haves and the Have-Nots, calculates that about 80 per cent of global inequality is the result of inequality between rich nations and poor nations. Only 20 per cent is the result of inequality between rich and poor within nations. The Oxford thing matters, of course. But what matters much more is that I was born in England rather than Bangladesh or Uganda.”

 

Tags: ,

“Could Women’s Prisons Actually Be Eliminated In The United States?”

November 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The prison population in the United States is finally declining, thankfully, and at the Washington Post, Patricia O’Brien has a modest proposal for thinning that crowd even more: Stop incarcerating women, no matter the crime. Her suggestion is extreme, and we’d probably be better off just eliminating sentencing for most drug-possession crimes for both genders, though she does make some good points. An excerpt:

“Could women’s prisons actually be eliminated in the United States, where the rate of women’s incarceration has risen by 646 percent in the past 30 years? The context is different, but many of the arguments are the same.

Essentially, the case for closing women’s prisons is the same as the case for imprisoning fewer men. It is the case against the prison industrial complex and for community-based treatment where it works better than incarceration. But there is evidence that prison harms women more than men, so why not start there?

Any examination of the women who are in U.S. prisons reveals that the majority are nonviolent offenders with poor education, little employment experience and multiple histories of abuse from childhood through adulthood. Women are also more likely than men to have children who rely on them for support — 147,000 American children have mothers in prison.

Prison nation

The United States is a prison nation. More than 1.5 million people are incarcerated in the country. And this obsession with punishment is expensive. Cumulatively, states spend more than $52 billion a year on their prison systems. The federal government also spends tens of billions to police, prosecute and imprison people, though research demonstrates that incarceration harms individual well-being and does not improve public safety.

What purpose is served by subjecting the most disempowered, abused and nonviolent women to the perpetually negative environment of prisons?”

Tags:

“We Remain A Very Long Way From Being Able To Automate All Jobs”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While I don’t believe technological unemployment is coming for all jobs in the near future, I certainly think the transition could increasingly gain steam (or electricity or what have you). Economist Robin Hansen doesn’t agree, believing there will be merely a gradual replacement of human labor by machinery, no different now in the AI era than it’s been for centuries. From “This Time Isn’t Different” at Overcoming Bias:

“In each boom many loudly declare high expectations and concern regarding rapid near-term progress in automation. ‘The machines are finally going to soon put everyone out of work!’ Which of course they don’t. We’ve instead seen a pretty slow & steady rate of humans displaced by machines on jobs.

Today we are in another such boom. For example, David Brooks recently parroted Kevin Kelley saying this time is different because now we have cheaper hardware, better algorithms, and more data. But those facts were also true in most of the previous booms; nothing has fundamentally changed! In truth, we remain a very long way from being able to automate all jobs, and we should expect the slow steady rate of job displacement to long continue.

One way to understand this is in terms of the distribution over human jobs of how good machines need to be to displace humans. If this parameter is distributed somewhat evenly over many orders of magnitude, then continued steady exponential progress in machine abilities should continue to translate into only slow incremental displacement of human jobs. Yes machines are vastly better than they were before, but they must get far more vastly better to displace most human workers.”

Tags:

“The Sunshine Here Has Fried Peoples’ Brains”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Another new item about one of my favorite movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself, this one a Q&A with director Thom Andersen conducted by Standard Culture. An excerpt about the differences between celluloid Los Angeles and New York City and the actual cities:

“Question:

How are New York and Los Angeles represented differently in movies?

Thom Andersen:

It’s a big question. When sound came in [to film], there was an influx of New York writers to Los Angeles, so there were many, many films set in the NY, although they were filmed in Los Angeles, mostly on stages. They created this picture of New York as this magical city. And that kind of romanticizing of a city never happened with Los Angeles except in some movies made by directors who came from other places for whom Los Angeles was a magical city. For local filmmakers, Los Angeles had a more mixed feeling — something that seems to continue to the present day. There’s something about New York that lends itself to representation on film. It may be simply the fact, as Rem Koolhaas said: it’s a city based on a culture of congestion. Whereas LA is a culture of dispersion, which make it harder to represent on film.

Question:

Do you prefer New York or Los Angeles?

Thom Andersen:

Los Angeles is an easier place to get things done, but to me, New York is still the center of the world. People look better there. They’re smarter. The sunshine here has fried peoples’ brains.”

Tags:

“Whitman Did Live With The Books”

November 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Just once I came across George Whitman in the Paris Shakespeare & Company, but I didn’t pay the eccentric and legendary owner much mind, so distracted I was by the leaking ceiling and broken floor. Still, wow, what a bookshop. From Bruce Handy’s new Vanity Fair piece about the fabled store:

“You know who else loved Shakespeare and Company and who wasn’t a writer with skin in the game? Frank Sinatra—according, that is, to Ed Walters, a former pit boss at the Sands, in Las Vegas, who was taken under Sinatra’s wing in the 1960s and offered this account for a forthcoming history the store plans to publish:

What few Sinatra fans know is that he loved books, especially history books. He was in the casino at a 21 table, playing blackjack and talking with his friends. He told the guys, ‘I’m giving Eddie some books to educate him. He needs it.’

He asked about a book he’d given me, was I reading it. He said, ‘Eddie you must travel and when you do, go to Paris, go to the Shakespeare bookstore. I know the guy there. . . . Go see the guy George—he’s a guy that lives with the books.’

Whitman died on December 14, 2011, two days after his 98th birthday. Unlike many once young bohemians and idealistic self-proclaimed Communists, he hewed to his ideals all the way through to the end. He made a fetish of thriftiness, sometimes cooking from restaurant and market leavings for himself and guests. Unwilling to pay for haircuts, he trimmed his by lighting it on fire with candles. (You can see him do so in a video on YouTube that is equal parts beguiling and horrifying.) His one concession to fashion: a grotty paisley jacket he wore for decades and which had already seen better days when the poet Ted Joans described it as never-been-cleaned in 1974. In short, he was the rare businessman who cared little for money except as a vehicle to expand his shop, which over the decades grew from a single ground-floor room into the multi-floor, ad-hoc institution it is today. In a eulogy he wrote for Whitman, Ferlinghetti described Shakespeare and Company as ‘a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books.’ I like to think of it as a half-planned, half-accreted, site-specific folk-art masterpiece: the Watts Towers of bookselling, with its warren of narrow passageways lined by casually carpentered bookshelves; its small rooms adorned with whimsical names (OLD SMOKY READING ROOM and BLUE OYSTER TEAROOM); its owner’s favorite epigrams painted above doorways and on steps (LIVE FOR HUMANITY and BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE); its scavenged floorings, including, in one of the ground-floor rooms, marble tiling Whitman is said to have stolen decades ago from Montparnasse Cemetery and laid down in an abstract mosaic around the store’s ‘wishing well’—a hole in which customers toss coins to be harvested by the store’s more impecunious residents. (Sign: FEED THE STARVING WRITERS.)

Sinatra was right, by the way: Whitman did live with the books, eventually taking a small apartment on the building’s fourth floor (or third, by French floor-numbering convention), which was really just an extension of the store. His own back bedroom had three walls of bookshelves, double-lined with books: novels, poetry, biographies, philosophy, complete sets of Freud and Jung—pretty much anything you can think of, plus the detective novels he kept stashed under his pillows. That bedroom is where, following a stroke, he passed away, so Sinatra could have said he died with the books, too.”

Tags: , ,

“Mr. McConnell And His Colleagues Have Done Everything They Could To Undermine Effective Policy”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I hope we’re not going to get lectures about how Democrats lost so many states in the midterm elections because they didn’t communicate their message clearly enough, they didn’t find the “magic words.” Nothing presents more clarity than a family desperate for healthcare visiting doctors for the first time in years. You can’t be clearer than life and death. I don’t think those people have been “tricked” if they then choose to elect politicians desperate to take that benefit from them, as they did with Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Sure, it would have been great for the media to explain recently how universal healthcare lifts the threshold for a plague in America, imported or “home-grown,” than to engage in ceaseless fearmongering about Ebola, a virus yet to claim a single U.S. citizen on American soil. But I think the people get the media and government they deserve. If they want to vote their ideology and aspirations rather than their reality, that’s what going to happen. The matter with Kansas, at long last, may be Kansans. From Paul Krugman at the New York Times:

“But the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.

Will things change now that the G.O.P. can’t so easily evade responsibility? I guess we’ll find out.”

Tags:

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

November 7, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Strange request: Can someone email me photo of their Combat roach bait?

It’s too complicated to explain why, but I need a photo of a black Combat roach bait trap in someone’s home, and ideally the shot shows a bit of their apartment so I can tell what part of the home the trap is in.

I searched online but all I found were images of the traps themselves or the packaging. But I need a photo of an actual trap in someone’s home.

Thanks!!

“[It] Is Known Mostly For Being Perhaps The World’s First Bitcoin-Only Cafe”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Tuan C. Nguyen’s Washington Post piece about Paralelní Polis, a Czechoslovakian cafe opened by crypto-anarchists in which the coin of the realm is virtual:

“Step inside the newest coffeehouse on Dělnická street in Prague and it doesn’t take long to notice that something’s amiss. There’s no cash register, nor a counter where customers would typically form a line.

Instead, you’ll find a long, wood slab table situated ever so slightly towards the left side of the room, where a wide selection of pastries, along with menus, plates, cups, utensils, jugs of water and an expresso machine can be found neatly laid out in the open.

Oddly enough, there’s something about the arrangement that’s refreshing, and at the same time, a bit disconcerting. Upon passing through the first time, my initial reaction was to quickly scan the room for any apron-wearing employee. And as the confusion intensified, so did the urge to grab a cup and, heck, whip up a latte myself.

Just as I began mulling over that very notion, a gentlemen with a tightly-trimmed beard and who looked to be in his 20’s, got up from a nearby table, where he had been seated with a couple of young women, and walked over to greet me.

‘I know the set-up can be sort of disorientating, but that’s the whole point,’ Michal Navrátil, operations manager and part-time barista, assured me. ‘The idea is that by not having uniforms, we also get rid of the imposed separation between patrons and workers.’

Paralelní Polis, which in Czech means ‘Parallel World,’ is known mostly for being perhaps the world’s first bitcoin-only cafe. All transactions — from wages to point of sale — are processed virtually, using one of the most well-recognized cryptocurrencies. More broadly though, the recently-renovated space, which includes a co-working room and hacker space, was conceived as way to demonstrate on a micro level how an entirely decentralized society might function.”

Tags: ,

A Brief Note From 1871 About Stolen Teeth

November 6, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 30, 1871 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“During the days of the resurrectionists or body-snatchers, when graveyards were subjected to pillage for supplying anatomists with subjects for dissection, the teeth from the dead bodies formed a frequent article of sale for dentists. Sometimes graves were opened for the teeth alone, as being small and easily concealed articles. Mr. Cooper, the surgeon, relates an instance of a man feigning to look for a burial place for his wife, and thus obtaining access to the vault of a meeting-house, the trap-door of which he unbolted; at night he let himself down into the vault, and pocketed the front teeth of the whole of the buried congregation, by which he cleared fifty pounds!”

Tags: ,

“The Internet And Social Networks Make It Easy To Indoctrinate Young People”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Young people, their minds not yet made up, have always been the easiest to recruit, but there’s something different about ISIS poaching the impressionable for extremism, and it’s social networks being repurposed for anti-social behavior. France has been hardest hit, with nearly 1,000 teens and twentysomethings joining the Mideast madness. Two factors overlap many of the cases: The children were headed for careers which could have genuinely helped the world, and they’ve been drawn into the circle of hatred online. We’re all connected now, for better and worse. From Julia Amalia Heyer at Spiegel:

“The number of young people who have become radicalized and have disappeared is rising rapidly. More than 140 families have contacted Bouzar since January 2014.

Radicalization used to be limited to the poor and the uneducated, says Bouzar. Immigrants from Muslim backgrounds were usually the ones who joined jihadist groups. But the situation has changed today, she explains. ‘Now three-quarters of them come from atheist families.’ They include Christians and Jews, and almost all are from the middle class, with some coming from upper-class families, the children of teachers, civil servants and doctors. Bouzar is even familiar with a case involving an elite female university student. It also appears that more and more girls and young women are fantasizing about jihad.

Indoctrination

The Internet and social networks make it easy to indoctrinate young people. In her research, Bouzar discovered that the French-speaking unit of the Al-Nusra Front actually employs headhunters to recruit young women and men.

The process of brainwashing usually follows the same principles, not unlike the approach taken by sects. First the victim, be it a boy or a girl, is isolated from his or her surroundings. The young people are pressured to sever all ties to family and friends. Then the indoctrination begins, through videos about genetically engineered food or alleged conspiracies. The goal is to make the victims believe that the world is evil and that only they have been chosen to make it a better place.

As a result of this brainwashing, the young women and men gradually lose their connection to everyday life and their old identities. Once a new identity has been created, they often see themselves as members of a chosen group of fighters for a better world.

Bouzar has found that the radicalized young women have a common trait: They are all interested in careers in social work or humanitarian aid.”

Tags:

Old Print Article: “Agatha Christie, Missing Writer, Believed Found,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1926)

November 6, 2014 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The original “gone girl,” mystery writer Agatha Christie abandoned her automobile one day in 1926 and vanished without a trace. For 11 days, a large-scale womanhunt fanned across the English countryside, with a thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searching for a body, dead or alive. Screaming headlines everywhere expressed concern for her (and provided lurid entertainment). When Christie was discovered alive and living quietly at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Yorkshire, the press and people turned, angered by what they thought was perhaps a publicity stunt–and maybe just a little disappointed subconsciously that the story’s final chapter wouldn’t have the worst possible end. Was it martial discord or amnesia or electroshock therapy or something else that drove the novelist from her life? Nobody really knows. Two Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles follow about the aftermath of the case.

From the December 14, 1926 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

From the December 15, 1926 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags:

“There Are No Secretaries Here”

November 5, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Dictaphones and typewriters were becoming office heirlooms decades ago, as demonstrated in this 1976 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation video about the computerized, automated office of tomorrow.

“We Actually Use Less Water Now For All Purposes Than We Did Back In 1970”

November 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It seems almost impossible that the United States uses less water than it did 45 years ago, but that’s the finding of the Pacific Institute. Growing population and villages of computer servers that need constant cooling would suggest we’re thirstier than ever, but in addition to improved conservation methods, globalization and outsourcing have played roles in the apparent reduction. From Brad Plumer at Vox:

“The US economy keeps expanding and the population keeps growing. But we actually use less water now for all purposes than we did back in 1970. That includes freshwater for our showers and toilets. It includes farm irrigation. It also includes withdrawals of both fresh and saline water to cool our fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.

The underlying data comes from a new report by the US Geological Survey, which notes that water for power plants (45 percent) and irrigation (33 percent) still made up most water withdrawals in the US as of 2010. But use in both of those areas has been declining over time.

Some of the credit goes to major efficiency gains: Power plants have implemented more efficient cooling systems that either recirculate water or use ‘dry’ cooling. More and more farmers are turning to drip irrigation and other efficient watering methods (though this is far from universal). Inside homes, toilets and showers have become much more efficient. And recycling of wastewater has become more common in some cities.

But that’s not the whole story: The USGS also notes that some manufacturing facilities that once used a fair bit of water for industrial purposes have moved overseas.”

Tags:

“It May Represent Another Step Towards Durable, Practical, Printed Guns—Even Semi-Automatic Ones”

November 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As we become faster, cheaper and even more out of control, as the anarchy of the Internet imposes itself on life in three dimensions, controlling objects, even deadly, semi-automatic ones, will be all but impossible. The future points to things that can be pointed at you–cameras, tricorders, guns, etc. From Andy Greenberg at Wired:

“As 3-D printed guns have evolved over the past 18 months from a science-fictional experiment into a subculture, they’ve faced a fundamental limitation: Cheap plastic isn’t the best material to contain an explosive blast. Now an amateur gunsmith has instead found a way to transfer that stress to a component that’s actually made of metal—the ammunition.

Michael Crumling, a 25-year-old machinist from York, Pennsylvania, has developed a round designed specifically to be fired from 3-D printed guns. His ammunition uses a thicker steel shell with a lead bullet inserted an inch inside, deep enough that the shell can contain the explosion of the round’s gunpowder instead of transferring that force to the plastic body or barrel of the gun. Crumling says that allows a home-printed firearm made from even the cheapest materials to be fired again and again without cracking or deformation. And while his design isn’t easily replicated because the rounds must be individually machined for now, it may represent another step towards durable, practical, printed guns—even semi-automatic ones.”

Tags: ,

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

November 5, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“I want to fuck Blanche.”

My Story – 35 (Danbury)

I’m a happily married man who loves his wife and never cheats. She’s still hot to me and looks better everyday. Here’s the thing: I find myself sexually attracted to 98% of the women I see, wherever I may be. Whether it’s hot women who work out to women over 300 lbs, I get hard just looking at them. Any race too. Age doesn’t matter either. I watch Golden Girls simply because I want to fuck Blanche. I never give in to temptation, in fact I usually take this horniess home and make love to the Mrs. But even with us having sex 4 times a week, I still masturbate at least three times a day. Even awkwardly shaped women are conjuring up orgasms. Some of the women most people think dress inappropriately are the ones that turn me on the most. I know this isn’t normal. Am I just a sex addict?

“Drunks Invariably Run Up To Grab His Beard Without Asking”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There’s really no representative person who raises a 340-pound log above his head. Case in point: Andrew Palmer, the seventh strongest man in America (or at least on the nation’s strongman-competition circuit), a mountainous software engineer who moonlights by moving trees with his limbs, while performing in a surprisingly subdued modern Herculean sideshow. An excerpt follows from “Carry That Weight,” Alex Pappademas’ very fun Grantland portrait of Palmer.

______________________________

There are no typical strongmen. Michael Caruso is also a microbiologist. The Bulgarian Dimitar Savatinov came to the sport after a stint as an actual strongman with Ringling Brothers, where his act, according to the web site Rogue Fitness, involved “laying [sic] on broken glass while a board on his chest had twelve performers dancing on it, bending iron bars, [and] holding and spinning seven girls on a  human carousel[.]“ Five days a week, Andrew Palmer works as a software engineer at a startup in Seattle. Before that he worked for Microsoft. He played high school football and was briefly the only 300-pound forward on the school soccer team. After college, he slowed down, gained desk-job weight. He started training for his first strongman contest — the 2008 NorCal Winter Strongman Challenge, in Concord, California — the way you might set your sights on a half-marathon. It was a reason to go to the gym. He figured he’d do it and go to the contest and get his ass kicked. Instead he came in second, just behind a more experienced strongman named Chris Grantano. That was how it started.

Palmer had some issues with depression when he was younger, and the lifting helps with that. It helps him sleep. It’s almost like meditation. It does what meditation is supposed to do — it takes him off the wheel of thought and experience for a little while. “When you’re grinding out reps,” he told me in Vegas, “you fall into a tunnel vision where there’s literally nothing but the movement. You’re doing that movement over and over, and then it stops, and you come back, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m back. I remember who I am again.’”

The trick is having an existence to come back to. Palmer likes having a circle of friends who don’t do what he does. In recent months, his Instagram feed has included blurry concert photos of Echo & the Bunnymen at the Showbox and Erasure at the 9:30 Club and EMA at a music festival in Portland. Palmer goes to a lot of rock festivals, even though whenever he’s in a crowded place with alcohol flowing, drunks invariably run up to grab his beard without asking, the way strangers feel entitled to touch a pregnant woman’s belly. Palmer likes a few beers, Palmer likes a hang. “I know guys who would never drink a beer except for the night after a contest,” he says. “More power to you, but I’m gonna drink beer more often than that. And if that means I don’t ever take top three at World’s Strongest Man, I’ll deal with that, because otherwise I could go crazy.”•

_______________________________

“C’mon, Andy!”:

Tags: , , , ,

A Note From 1932 About Lincoln’s Last Travels

November 4, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the February 12, 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“After the death of the President, his body was carted about the nation in the world’s largest funeral march. A man was detailed daily to brush the dust from his face after he had lain in state in various cities.

His body was moved 19 times between the time of his burial and 1900.”

Tags:

“The First Thing I Noticed Was The Bionic Bar”

November 4, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Robots have entered the service sector through department stores and hotels, and now we can add cruises to the list, with the Bionic Bar aboard the new “smart ship,” Royal Caribbean’s Quantum of the Seas, which employs a “Technology Ambassador.”

“Welcome To The Beginning Of What Is Being Touted As The Internet’s Next Wave”

November 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Internet of Things is wonderful–and terrible. How valuable will be the aggregated information when all objects report back to the cloud and the network effect takes hold, and how impossible it will be to opt out, how unfortunately that information will sometimes be used. If we go from the ten million sensors currently connected to the Internet to 100 trillion by 2030 as theorist Jeremy Rifkin predicts, the next digital revolution will have taken place, with all the good and bad that entails. The opening of Sue Halpern’s New York Review of Books analysis of a slew of new titles about how tomorrow may find us all tethered:

“Every day a piece of computer code is sent to me by e-mail from a website to which I subscribe called IFTTT. Those letters stand for the phrase ‘if this then that,’ and the code is in the form of a ‘recipe’ that has the power to animate it. Recently, for instance, I chose to enable an IFTTT recipe that read, ‘if the temperature in my house falls below 45 degrees Fahrenheit, then send me a text message.’ It’s a simple command that heralds a significant change in how we will be living our lives when much of the material world is connected—like my thermostat—to the Internet.

It is already possible to buy Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals your home that you are a certain distance away and coffeemakers that sync to the alarm on your phone, as well as WiFi washer-dryers that know you are away and periodically fluff your clothes until you return, and Internet-connected slow cookers, vacuums, and refrigerators. ‘Check the morning weather, browse the web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family—all from the refrigerator door,’ reads the ad for one.

Welcome to the beginning of what is being touted as the Internet’s next wave by technologists, investment bankers, research organizations, and the companies that stand to rake in some of an estimated $14.4 trillion by 2022—what they call the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco Systems, which is one of those companies, and whose CEO came up with that multitrillion-dollar figure, takes it a step further and calls this wave ‘the Internet of Everything,’ which is both aspirational and telling. The writer and social thinker Jeremy Rifkin, whose consulting firm is working with businesses and governments to hurry this new wave along, describes it like this:

The Internet of Things will connect every thing with everyone in an integrated global network. People, machines, natural resources, production lines, logistics networks, consumption habits, recycling flows, and virtually every other aspect of economic and social life will be linked via sensors and software to the IoT platform, continually feeding Big Data to every node—businesses, homes, vehicles—moment to moment, in real time. Big Data, in turn, will be processed with advanced analytics, transformed into predictive algorithms, and programmed into automated systems to improve thermodynamic efficiencies, dramatically increase productivity, and reduce the marginal cost of producing and delivering a full range of goods and services to near zero across the entire economy.

In Rifkin’s estimation, all this connectivity will bring on the ‘Third Industrial Revolution,’ poised as he believes it is to not merely redefine our relationship to machines and their relationship to one another, but to overtake and overthrow capitalism once the efficiencies of the Internet of Things undermine the market system, dropping the cost of producing goods to, basically, nothing. His recent book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, is a paean to this coming epoch.

It is also deeply wishful, as many prospective arguments are, even when they start from fact.”

Tags: ,

“If Banks Can Be Hacked, Why Not Aircraft?”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A terrorist remotely taking control of a plane is very, very unlikely. Hacking into the system and causing a crash-inducing error (or threatening to activate one to demand ransom) is possible but also not the easiest thing to do at this point. An employee introducing a “ghost” into the machine from the inside is the simplest way to hijack a modern airplane through an act of digital terrorism. That hasn’t happened yet, has it? Has it??? From the Economist:

“How realistic is it for computer hackers to interfere with aircraft while they are in the air, a phenomenon known as cyberjacking? It partly depends on terminology. Hijacking and fully controlling an aircraft by remote means borders on the impossible, according to David Stupples of City University in London, a specialist in communications. But interfering with an aircraft’s systems, including inducing a catastrophic failure, in order to extort money is a distinct possibility, he warns.

There are two ways this could be done, one more likely than the other. The first is a cyber attack from the outside. Passengers increasingly demand internet connectivity for work, games, movies and the like. But drilling holes in fuselages for additional antennae is costly and inefficient. So internet signals are routed through existing communications architecture, such as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which is used for short messages, or the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), an anti-collision system. As these both send and receive information they can, in theory, be targetted. When aircraft become more connected to the wider world they begin to look, electronically at least, like fixed structures. If banks can be hacked, why not aircraft?

Yet such an attack from outside is unlikely due to the technical challenges of overcoming software architectures that, unlike banks, are currently unfamiliar and largely bespoke. It would be far easier to pay a disgruntled employee to implant malware either directly into the aircraft during a maintenance routine or through the jetway when the aircraft docks to upload the In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) system. (The IFE on the Boeing 787 used to link to the flight control system, but the company have since rectified this, according to Mr Stupples.) Just the threat of activating such a program when a flight is in the air could be enough to trigger a ransom.

So why hasn’t it happened yet?”

Tags:

“In The Future, Berners-Lee Sees AI Dominating Communications”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite, you know, the issues, I’m happy there’s a World Wide Web, understanding how much it’s enriched my life with its trove of information. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who gifted the globe with double-yous, spoke about his creation and other topics with Lucy Ingham of Factor-Tech. A passage about AI:

“Turning his attention to artificial intelligence, Berners-Lee argues that it was, more or less, already here.

‘Yes, you don’t have a completely human-like assistant helping you with everything,’ he says. ‘But originally, 20 years ago they taught in schools that there are things that people can do and things that computers can do.

‘Computers can do calculations; computers can do lots of data. People can do intuitive things like music and play chess. People can do things which need really sort of very powerful parallel processing, like driving a car, which is the sort of thing that computing can never do.

‘Ok, hello? A large number of those things which were up there as challenging for artificial intelligence actually have quietly gone by. AI has done that.’

In the future, Berners-Lee sees AI dominating communications.

‘As the machines get more powerful, and in something like financial trading in a lot of companies the work is all done by machines. The machines are making the trading decisions, the machines are basically running the company. So that means that communication out there is largely going to be machine communication – it’s going to be data.'”

Tags: ,

Old Print Article: “Mail By Pneumatic Tubes A Possibility For All Houses In The Future,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1900)

November 3, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tubes would eventually bring mail to every home, but they weren’t of the pneumatic variety. In a predictive piece he wrote for the December 30, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, U.S. Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith offered that the type of pneumatic tubing system utilized in early-1900s New York City might someday be linked to every individual residence. He was right in the big picture, even if he got the details wrong.

Tags:

“Not Everything Is What It Appears To Be, Missy”

November 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Growing up is bruising in the best of circumstances but imagine the marks that need healing if your father happens to be a serial murderer. That was the reality for Melissa Moore, daughter of Keith Jesperson, the “Happy Face Killer.” In “My Evil Dad,” a new BBC article, she writes of their uncomfortable relationship and how she gradually escaped his dark shadow after the revelation of his awful actions. An excerpt:

One of the things about my dad – which made me very uncomfortable as a young woman – was that he was very explicit about his sexual relationships. For example, he sometimes went into graphic detail about what it had been like sleeping with my mother. He would leer at women in public, make lewd remarks about them, and harass them. That morning in Denny’s Diner was no different – I remember him flirting horribly with the waitress while we sat in a window booth.

It was during this meal that my dad said, “Not everything is what it appears to be, Missy.” And I said, “What do you mean Dad?”

I watched him wrestling with something internally. Then he said: “You know, I have something to tell you, and it’s really important.” There was a long silence before I asked him what it was. “I can’t tell you, sweetie. If I tell you, you will tell the police. I’m not what you think I am, Melissa.”

I felt my stomach drop, like I was on a rollercoaster and had just hit the lowest part of the loop. I had to run to the bathroom. When I returned to the booth I felt calm again and I found to my relief that my dad was willing to just drop the conversation.

But I go back to that incident so often and I think: “If he had told me, what would have happened next? If he had told me about his seven murders – it was very soon to be eight – would I have gone to the police? Having revealed his secrets, would he have given me the chance?”

Could my father have killed me? That has been a huge question mark in my life.•

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »