Urban Studies

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“I Feel A Little Guilty Comparing Bezos And Putin”

September 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Financial Times essay, economist Tim Harford finds a link no one else was looking for: the scorched-earth strategies which drive both Amazon and contemporary Russia. An excerpt:

“Brad Stone’s excellent book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, paints Amazon’s founder to be a visionary entrepreneur, dedicated to serving his customers. But it also reports that Bezos was willing to take big losses in the hope of weakening competitors. Zappos, the much-loved online shoe retailer, faced competition from an Amazon subsidiary that first offered free shipping and then started paying customers $5 for every pair of shoes they ordered. Quidsi, which ran Diapers.com, was met with a price war from “Amazon Mom.” Industry insiders told Stone that Amazon was losing $1m a day just selling nappies. Both Zappos and Quidsi ended up being bought out by Amazon.

When the weapons of war are low prices, consumers benefit at first. But the long term looks worrying: a future in which nobody dares to compete with Amazon. Apple is a striking contrast: the company’s refusal to compete aggressively on price makes it hugely profitable but has also attracted a swarm of competitors.

Consider a grimmer parallel. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the chain store. Georgia, Ukraine and many other former Soviet states or satellites must consider whether to seek ties with the west. In each case Putin must decide whether to accommodate or open costly hostilities. The conflict in Ukraine has been disastrous for Russian interests in the short run but it may have bolstered Putin’s personal position. And if his strategy convinces the world that Putin will never share prosperity, his belligerence may yet pay off.

I feel a little guilty comparing Bezos and Putin. My only regret about Bezos’s Amazon is that there aren’t three other companies just like it. I do not feel the same about Putin’s Russia.”

 

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Old Print Article: “Thomas Mann — The Artist In Exile,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1937)

September 21, 2014 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

I previously posted a 1955 New York Times interview which Thomas Mann sat for near the end of his life, and below I’ve put a piece from a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about him that ran in the April 18, 1937 edition, when he was living in America, an exile from Nazi Germany during the run-up to World War II. He seemed confident about the fall of fascism. I never read before that he’d dined with FDR, though it makes sense given the writer’s Nobel stature and his social nature. The piece was written by Alvah Bessie, who a decade later was to be blacklisted and imprisoned by HUAC as a member of the “Hollywood Ten,” along with Dalton Trumbo.

thomasmann1

thomasmann4

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“You’d Think That, Cameras Or Not, He’d Remember The Moment With Some Fondness. But No.”

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

Photographs aren’t life or memory, but in a time of cheap, ubiquitous cameras, the image, merely an imitation, is ascendant. Like the tree’s lonely fall in the forest, the event unrecorded has less currency. Without capture, does the moment even exist anymore? On some levels, no. From “We Are a Camera,” Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker piece about living in the GoPro flow:

“For two days in the Idaho mountains, [mountain biker Aaron] Chase’s cameras had been rolling virtually non-stop. Now, with his companions lagging behind, he started down the trail, which descended steeply into an alpine meadow. As he accelerated, he noticed, to his left, an elk galloping toward him from the ridge. He glanced at the trail, looked again to his left, and saw a herd, maybe thirty elk, running at full tilt alongside his bike, like a pod of dolphins chasing a boat. After a moment, they rumbled past him and crossed the trail, neither he nor the elk slowing, dust kicking up and glowing in the early-evening sun, amid a thundering of hooves. It was a magical sight. The light was perfect. And, as usual, Chase was wearing two GoPros. Here was his money shot—the stuff of TV ads and real bucks.

Trouble was, neither camera was rolling. What with his headache and the ample footage of the past days, he’d thought to hell with it, and had neglected, just this once, to turn his GoPros on. Now there was no point in riding with the elk. He slowed up and let them pass. ‘Idiot,’ he said to himself. ‘There goes my commercial.’

Once the herd was gone, it was as though it’d never been there at all—Sasquatch, E.T., yeti. Pics or it didn’t happen. Still, one doesn’t often find oneself swept up in a stampede of wild animals. Might as well hope to wingsuit through a triple rainbow. So you’d think that, cameras or not, he’d remember the moment with some fondness. But no. ‘It was hell,’ Chase says now.

When the agony of missing the shot trumps the joy of the experience worth shooting, the adventure athlete (climber, surfer, extreme skier) reveals himself to be something else: a filmmaker, a brand, a vessel for the creation of content. He used to just do the thing—plan the killer trip or trick and then complete it, with panache. Maybe a photographer or film crew tagged along, and afterward there’d be a slide show at community centers and high-school gyms, or an article in a magazine. Now the purpose of the trip or trick is the record of it. Life is footage.”

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“Page Started Up A Google 2.0 Project Inside The Company A Year Ago To Look At The Big Challenges Facing Humanity”

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

Yahoo! doesn’t know what it wants to be, while Google wants to be everything. It’s clear Larry Page would like to do radical experiments on the micro scale, but he really dreams of the macro, hoping to establish a next-wave Google to tackle the world’s non-virtual problems. From Vlad Savov at The Verge:

“As if self-driving cars, balloon-carried internet, or the eradication of death weren’t ambitious enough projects, Google CEO Larry Page has apparently been working behind the scenes to set up even bolder tasks for his company. The Information reports that Page started up a Google 2.0 project inside the company a year ago to look at the big challenges facing humanity and the ways Google can overcome them. Among the grand-scale plans discussed were Page’s desire to build a more efficient airport as well as a model city. To progress these ideas to fruition, the Google chief has also apparently proposed a second research and development lab, called Google Y, to focus on even longer-term programs that the current Google X, which looks to support future technology and is headed up by his close ally Sergey Brin.”

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“Half Earth Is The Goal”

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

E.O. Wilson has a bold plan for staving off a mass extinction of life on Earth: radical biodiversity ensured by demarcation. The evolutionary biologist wants humans to “rope off” half the planet for non-human species. Tony Hiss, the longtime New Yorker writer who did some wonderful work for that publication (like this and this) has an article in Smithsonian about Wilson’s bold proposal. An excerpt:

Throughout the 544 million or so years since hard-shelled animals first appeared, there has been a slow increase in the number of plants and animals on the planet, despite five mass extinction events. The high point of biodiversity likely coincided with the moment modern humans left Africa and spread out across the globe 60,000 years ago. As people arrived, other species faltered and vanished, slowly at first and now with such acceleration that Wilson talks of a coming “biological holocaust,” the sixth mass extinction event, the only one caused not by some cataclysm but by a single species—us.

Wilson recently calculated that the only way humanity could stave off a mass extinction crisis, as devastating as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, would be to set aside half the planet as permanently protected areas for the ten million other species. “Half Earth,” in other words, as I began calling it—half for us, half for them. A version of this idea has been in circulation among conservationists for some time.

“It’s been in my mind for years,” Wilson told me, ‘that people haven’t been thinking big enough—even conservationists. Half Earth is the goal, but it’s how we get there, and whether we can come up with a system of wild landscapes we can hang onto. I see a chain of uninterrupted corridors forming, with twists and turns, some of them opening up to become wide enough to accommodate national biodiversity parks, a new kind of park that won’t let species vanish.”•

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“Cocaine Use Was Rampant And Crafty Dealers Were Constantly On The Prowl For Inconspicuous Tools”

September 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Priceonomics post, Zachary Crockett recalls the insidious repurposing of a seemingly innocuous tool, the McDonald’s plastic coffee spoon, which became, in the 1970s, a handheld device for coke dealers and users, as well as a pawn in the early years of the War on Drugs. The opening:

“In the 1970s, every McDonald’s coffee came with a special stirring spoon. It was a glorious, elegant utensil — long, thin handle, tiny scooper on the end, each pridefully topped with the golden arches. It was a spoon specially designed to stir steaming brews, a spoon with no bad intentions.

It was also a spoon that lived in a dangerous era for spoons. Cocaine use was rampant and crafty dealers were constantly on the prowl for inconspicuous tools with which to measure and ingest the white powder. In the thralls of an anti-drug initiative, the innocent spoon soon found itself at the center of controversy, prompting McDonald’s to  redesign it. In the years since, the irreproachable contraption has tirelessly haunted the fast food chain.

This is the story of how the ‘Mcspoon’ became the unlikely scapegoat of the War on Drugs.”

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A Brief Note From 1911 About Groomed Felines

September 18, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 5, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Topeka, Kan. — Shaving of all cats is recommended by the State Board of Health of Kansas as a means of preventing the spread of disease.

The board charges that the cat, with its long hair, carries more germs than any other animal.

‘Shave the cats,’ said Dr. Deacon of the State Board of Health, yesterday. ‘Keep their hair short just like you would a horse’s or a dog’s. If that is too much trouble, kill them.'”

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“It’s Almost An Infinite Market In Our Lifetimes”

September 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

EVs don’t help the environment much unless the electricity is being produced in green, alternative ways, and solar homes won’t become common until they’re more affordable. Elon Musk of Tesla and his cousin Lyndon Rive of SolarCity are trying to power those potential markets with multiple uses of the planned Nevada Gigafactory. From “The Musk Family Plan for Transforming the World’s Energy,” Christopher Mims’ new WSJ piece:

“Thanks to the economies of scale that will come from Tesla’s gigafactory, within 10 years every solar system that SolarCity sells will come with a battery-storage system, says Mr. Rive, and it will still produce energy cheaper than what is available from the local utility company.

Mr. Musk also noted that in any future in which a country switches fully to electric cars, its electricity consumption will roughly double. That could either mean more utilities, and more transmission lines, or a rollout of solar—exactly the sort that SolarCity hopes for.

America’s solar energy generating capacity has grown at around 40% a year, says Mr. Rive. ‘So if you just do the math, at 40% growth in 10 years time that’s 170 gigawatts a year,’ says Mr. Rive. That’s equivalent to the electricity consumption of about 5 million homes, which is still ‘not that much,’ he says, when compared with overall demand for electricity. ‘It’s almost an infinite market in our lifetimes.’

There are almost innumerable barriers to the realization of Messrs. Musk and Rive’s plan.”

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“With The Possible Exception Of North Korea, The United States Has A Higher Incarceration Rate Than Any Other Nation”

September 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A gigantic prison population in the U.S. has unsurprisingly begat an intricate illicit social order behind bars. The crime hasn’t truly disappeared–it’s just been disappeared into cells. From Graeme Wood’s new Atlantic article, “How Gangs Took Over Prisons“:

“Understanding how prison gangs work is difficult: they conceal their activities and kill defectors who reveal their practices. This past summer, however, a 32-year-old academic named David Skarbek published The Social Order of the Underworld, his first book, which is the best attempt in a long while to explain the intricate organizational systems that make the gangs so formidable. His focus is the California prison system, which houses the second-largest inmate population in the country—about 135,600 people, slightly more than the population of Bellevue, Washington, split into facilities of a few thousand inmates apiece. With the possible exception of North Korea, the United States has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation, at one in 108 adults. (The national rate rose for 30 years before peaking, in 2008, at one in 99. Less crime and softer punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then.)

Skarbek’s primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes from precisely what most of us would assume is the source ofdisorder: the major gangs, which are responsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, including cellphones, behind bars. ‘Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way,’ he says. ‘They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them.’ The gangs have business out on the streets, too, but their principal activity and authority resides in prisons, where other gangs are the main powers keeping them in check.

Skarbek is a native Californian and a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London. When I met him, on a sunny day on the Strand, in London, he was craving a taste of home. He suggested cheeseburgers and beer, which made our lunch American not only in topic of conversation but also in caloric consumption. Prison gangs do not exist in the United Kingdom, at least not with anything like the sophistication or reach of those in California or Texas, and in that respect Skarbek is like a botanist who studies desert wildflowers at a university in Norway.

Skarbek, whose most serious criminal offense to date is a moving violation, bases his conclusions on data crunches from prison systems (chiefly California’s, which has studied gangs in detail) and the accounts of inmates and corrections officers themselves. He is a treasury of horrifying anecdotes about human depravity—and ingenuity. There are few places other than a prison where men’s desires are more consistently thwarted, and where men whose desires are thwarted have so much time to think up creative ways to circumvent their obstacles.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 18, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

GOT MILK?

i’m looking for a pregnant woman or a mother who has just given birth that is producing a lot of milk.

“The Infection Had A Threshold”

September 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We know that Colony Collapse Disorder is the result of bees being stressed to death by a number of factors, but contagious illnesses transmitted by insects (and communicable by other means) can likewise be pressured out of existence if enough of the disease’s agents are countered until the system crashes. From “The Calculus of Contagion,” Adam Kucharski’s excellent Aeon essay about a mathematical approach to preventing potential pandemics like Ebola, a passage about Ronald Ross’ plan of attack for outmaneuvering malaria:

“To prove the connection between mosquitoes and malaria, Ross experimented with birds. He allowed mosquitoes to feed on the blood of an infected bird then bite healthy ones. Not long afterwards, the healthy birds came down with the disease, too. To verify his theory, Ross dissected the infected mosquitoes, and found malaria parasites in their saliva glands. Those parasites turned out to be Plasmodium, identified by a French military doctor who had discovered the bug in the blood cells of infected patients just a few years before.

Next, Ross wanted to show how the disease could be stopped, and his experiment with the water tank pointed the way. Get rid of enough insects, he reasoned, and malaria would cease to spread. To prove his theory, Ross, a keen amateur mathematician, constructed a theoretical model – a ‘mosquito theorem’ – outlining how mosquitoes might spread malaria in a human population. He split people into two groups – healthy or infected – and wrote down a set of equations to describe how mosquito numbers would affect the level of infection in each.

The human and mosquito populations formed a cycle of interactions: the rate at which people got infected depended on the number of times they were bitten by infected mosquitos, which depended on how many such mosquitos there were, which depended on how many humans had the parasite to pass back to those mosquitos, and so on. Ross found that for the disease to simmer along steadily in a population, as it did in India, the number of new infections per month would need to be equal to the number of people recovering from the disease.

Using his model, Ross showed that it wasn’t necessary to remove every mosquito to bring the disease under control. Destroy enough mosquitoes, and people infected with the parasite would recover before they were bitten enough times for the infection to continue at the same level. Therefore, over time, the disease would fall into decline. In other words, the infection had a threshold, with outbreaks on one side and elimination on the other.”

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“A Visit To North Korea Reveals Little. Our Trip Resembled The Truman Show.“

September 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

David Pilling of the Financial Times visited North Korea’s showcase city, Pyongyang, and had a “stage-managed” experience that elicited very little about the true nature of Kim Jong-un’s country-wide cult. An excerpt:

“One needs to be wary of impressions gleaned from Pyongyang. This is a showcase city, the home of the connected and presumably loyal elite. You have to remind yourself constantly that you are being shown the ‘good parts.’ The rest of North Korea is, to quote resident diplomats, ‘another country.’

The second thing to note is the pervasive sense of victimhood. Paul French’s book North Korea: State of Paranoia is aptly named. Any conversation on a serious topic starts and ends with Pyongyang’s struggle for survival in the face of unrelenting pressure from ‘the imperialist US’ and its ‘puppet’ South Korean servant. The US wants to control all of northeast Asia. China wants to use North Korea as a buffer. Everyone wants to topple the Kim regime. (Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.) Singled out for opprobrium are the regular US-South Korean military manoeuvres, which are deemed ample justification for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.

Even economic policy is framed in terms of external threat. That is why North Korea must be self-reliant – something it has patently failed to achieve given its dependence on outside aid. Paranoia assumes an almost surreal quality. Asked about the rate of economic growth, the head of one institute replies: “It is the policy of our party not to reveal statistics about our economy.”

A third observation, hardly surprising, is the sheer intensity of the cult of Kim. The interests of state and dynasty have merged. One senior researcher quoted a poem suggesting the Kims would rule forever. No mention of the nation’s founder is complete without the epithet ‘Great Leader’ and no reference to his 31-year-old grandson and current ruler without a nod to ‘the wise leadership of the Great Marshall Kim Jong Un.’ Kim badges, worn over the heart, are obligatory. So is bowing at the foot of the dynasty’s ubiquitous monuments.

Yet in the end, [Barbara] Demick is right. A visit to North Korea reveals little. Our trip resembled The Truman Show, in which the protagonist is trapped in a televised soap opera.”

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Old Print Article: “60 Years Underground,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1908)

September 17, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Much of Sven Hedin’s life was lived in public, but the truth about him is somewhat buried nonetheless, strange for a Swedish explorer who spent his life unearthing the hidden. His expeditions to Central Asia just before and after beginning of the twentieth century introduced the world to invaluable art and artifacts and folkways and cities that had been lost to time.

Hedin was admired for these efforts in all corners of the world, including the one occupied by Adolf Hitler. The geographer perplexingly returned the Führer’s admiration, believing in the Nazi’s nationalistic and traditionalist tendencies, which was obviously a catastrophic misjudgement. He was highly critical, however, of the Party’s anti-Semitism. These protests brought trouble. Hitler seems to have blackmailed the famed explorer into publishing pro-Nazi tracts by imperiling some of Hedin’s Jewish friends still inside Germany. But it’s difficult to believe Hedin encouraged Sweden to ally with Germany during WWII to save a few friends. He just apparently didn’t want to recognize the evil. A disease of the eye caused Hedin to become partially blind in 1940, an apt metaphor for this period of his life.

Long before his dubious politics, Hedin penned an article for Harper’s about an unusual subterranean Tibetan custom, a piece reprinted in the September 17, 1908 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“It Makes It Much Harder To Govern”

September 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For all the other depressing lessons it taught Americans, the Tea Party hysteria made on thing especially clear: There are large segments of America that believe the government is gaining too much control. The opposite is true, of course. Technological innovation has given us a decentralized media, which can be a good thing and sometimes bad. The power has shifted, and it’s not going back. From John Kerry’s comments reported by CSNews’ Terence P. Jeffrey:

“‘Ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.

‘It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest,’ said [John] Kerry, ‘and that is complicated by a rise of sectarianism and religious extremism that is prepared to employ violent means to impose on other people a way of thinking and a way of living that is completely contrary to everything the United States of America has ever stood for. So we need to keep in mind what our goals are and how complicated this world is that we’re operating in.'”

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“They Treated Me Like Royalty”

September 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

For Mark Landis, one of the world’s most prolific art forgers, it wasn’t business, just personal. He would duplicate and then donate, posing as a philanthropist or some such thing. Museums ate it up, and Landis received the love he was looking for, the thrill not coming from deception but affection. But he was spit back out after being exposed in 2008 as a fake. He did an AMA at Reddit as a new film about him, Art and Craft, is being released. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What made you become a forger and how did you realize forgery was a skill you had ?

Mark Landis:

Oh, okay! Way back, I had an impulse, I guess, it was around 1985, I had an impulse to – I guess I was watching things on TV, and you know, I was always seeing things on TV or in movies or about philanthropists giving things, and of course when you’re in a museum you see “Donated by” next to pictures – it was an impulse to give away a picture in Oakland while I was there on another business. And everybody was so nice to me, they treated me with so much deference and respect and friendship-they treated me like royalty. When I first found out I was in trouble, I was led to a Guardian article, and that’s a UK paper, and it said I had been treated like royalty – I had never been treated like royalty before. I liked it so much, I got addicted, and that’s how it all happened.

And what did royalty ever do to deserve to be treated like royalty, anyway?

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Question:

Do you believe that forgery is the true art? Could you transfer your skills to copying from real-life images or photos?

Mark Landis:

As far as the other things, it’s something I Never really thought of. Actually, I still don’t really think of myself as much of an artist, you know? I’m not much of an artist, and I haven’t got any great talent or anything, I do have a facility for arts & crafts, and the rest of it, I kind of lost track of it. I never thought of myself as really a “forger” either. As I said, it was an impulse and I got addicted to it. Everybody likes being treated like royalty, or having people treat them with deference and respect, that sort of thing. VIP treatment, that’s it. Everybody wants to get treated like a VIP, don’t they?

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Question:

What is your opinion on the monetary value of art & the massive prices paid for some artworks?

Mark Landis:

What’s my opinion? Gee… I hadn’t really thought about it… I guess it’s like any kind of commodity, or it’s more like fashion or something, you know, it’s very speculative… because pictures don’t have an intrinsic value, really, so you know, it’s determined by all kinds of things. I guess the best analogy would be the fashion world, you know, if somebody takes something up and then prices will rise and that sort of thing. That’s the best I can do. I’ve never answered that one before! No one ever valued my opinion or asked me that. So that’s the best I can do.•

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“It Demonstrates That Anyone Can Use A Computer Without Technical Knowledge”

September 16, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I posted this remarkable 1978 footage on the site a couple of years ago when it was briefly available. It shows the mysterious new world that was booting up inside the Palo Alto Byte Shop, one of the outlets in Paul Terrell’s early personal computer retail chain.

It makes me a little sad, though, that just for a brief, shining moment, the machinery and not merely the content, was in the hands of the users. Now it’s a top-down affair again, with consumers eagerly awaiting the next product announcement from Apple.

I don’t mean to disparage the amazing tools we’ve been handed, but I think that’s part of the problem: They’ve been handed to us. Perhaps our use of these tools would be more productive and less narcissistic if more of it had been the product of our own hands. Maybe the Maker culture will proliferate and change all of that.

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“Robotics And Artificial Intelligence Produce A Distinct Set Of Challenges With Considerable Overlap”

September 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a new Brookings paper, law professor Ryan Calo proposes that a federal robotics commission be formed to oversee the likely rapid expansion of automation and AI in America. It certainly sounds more useful than the FCC. An excerpt:

“Robotics stands poised to transform our society. This set of technologies has seen massive investment by the military and industry, as well as sustained attention by the media and other social, cultural, and economic institutions. Law is already responding: several states have laws governing driverless cars. Other states have laws concerning the use of drones. In Virginia, there is a law that requires insurance to cover the costs of telerobotic care.

The federal government is also dealing with robotics. There have been repeated hearings on drones and, recently, on high speed trading algorithms (market robots) and other topics on the Hill. Congress charged the Federal Aviation Administration with creating a plan to integrate drones into the national airspace by 2015. The Food and Drug Administration approved, and is actively monitoring, robotic surgery. And the NHTSA, in addition to dealing with software glitches in manned vehicles, has looked extensively at the issue of driverless cars and even promulgated guidance.

This activity is interesting and important, but hopelessly piecemeal: agencies, states, courts, and others are not in conversation with one another. Even the same government entities fail to draw links across similar technologies; drones come up little in discussions of driverless cars despite presenting similar issues of safety, privacy, and psychological unease.

Much is lost in this patchwork approach. Robotics and artificial intelligence produce a distinct set of challenges with considerable overlap—an insight that gets lost when you treat each robot separately. Specifically, robotics combines, for the first time, the promiscuity of data with physical embodiment—robots are software that can touch you. For better or for worse, we have been very tolerant of the harms that come from interconnectivity and disruptive innovation—including privacy, security, and hate speech. We will have to strike a new balance when bones are on the line in addition to bits.

Robotics increasingly display emergent behavior, meaning behavior that is useful but cannot be anticipated in advance by operators. The value of these systems is that they accomplish a task that we did not realize was important, or they accomplish a known goal in a way that we did not realize was possible. Kiva Systems does not organize Amazon’s warehouses the way a human would, which is precisely why Amazon engaged and later purchased the company. Yet criminal, tort, and other types of law rely on human intent and foreseeability to apportion blame when things go wrong.”

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A Brief Note From 1942 About Dinner

September 16, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 19, 1942 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“London — Fresh cat meat and dog meat is now sold for human consumption in the meat shops of Holland, but it first must be inspected for disease, the Dutch News Agency Aneta said today.”

“Their Vision Is Actually Orthodox”

September 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some are worried about alien encounters, while others long for them. From Kiveli Nikolaou’s Vice interview with political scientist Guillermo Almeyra about Posadaism, the belief among some Argentine socialists that UFOs will bring about Utopia: 

“Question:

Do Posadists really believe in aliens?

Guillermo Almeyra:

The logic goes as follows: Since there are billions of galaxies with billions of planets in them, there is bound to be [intelligent life] elsewhere. These alien people are communists and want to communicate with more advanced communists—the Posadists.

Question:

And how will they bring about socialism?

Guillermo Almeyra:

According to this theory, it is only under socialist conditions that the technology for interplanetary travel can be developed. So the emergence of signs of alien life is connected to the existence of socialism on a different planet. The aliens will plan the revolution on Earth based on their experiences of communism in their planet. This is the absurdity that some of us resisted—some less educated individuals accepted it.

Question:

What is the new society that Posadists are fighting for going to look like?

Guillermo Almeyra:

Their vision is actually orthodox: The revolution will destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with a state that will be founded according to the decisions of its workers. The media will be rehabilitated, the economy will be well organized, and exports or trade between countries will be monopolized by the state, as was done in the Soviet Union.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 16, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

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“I Think Illegally Growing Marijuana In Those States Will Become As Common As Illegally Brewing Whiskey”

September 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When a piece of the Underground Economy is exposed to the light of day, what happens to those peddlers who were most adept when skirting the law was a part of the bargain? From Paul Hiebert’s Pacific-Standard profile of a pot dealer whose business model has been disrupted:

“RIGHT NOW, IT’S HARD to tell what the end of marijuana prohibition would mean for Raymond. The experiments in Colorado and Washington are still young. The Washington Post reports that Colorado’s black market is nowhere near dead because the illegal stuff remains cheaper since it isn’t taxed or subject to other regulatory costs. The New York Times reports similar price issues in Washington caused by a small amount of regulated supply in the face of huge demand.

Some, however, think that once more growers and dispensaries enter the legal market, prices will adjust accordingly. It also may simply take a while for loyal customers to sever relationships with their established dealers. In the long run, Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California-Los Angeles and renowned expert on the topic of drug legality, believes street-level dealers will disappear almost completely. ‘I think illegally growing marijuana in those states will become as common as illegally brewing whiskey,’ he told a reporter last July.

‘If this was happening and I was 23 with no college degree or work experience, I’d be losing my mind,’ Raymond says. ‘I’d be like, ‘What the fuck am I going to do?”

But Raymond has investments and well over a year’s worth of salary saved up. He knows a lawyer who wants to transform his operation into a legitimate business when the time is right, but he also seems like he’d be fine with just walking away.”

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3 webisodes from Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair’s High Maintenance, currently one of the most miraculously written and acted shows in any format.

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“Mapping Is Going To Be Critical In The Future”

September 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s cartography at the granular level, but every twist and turn, detour and closure, highway and byway, will have to be constantly updated in real time if autonomous driving is to be made safe. Not only will the vehicles move but so will the road maps. From Vince Bond Jr. at Automotive News:

“DETROIT — History’s most intrepid explorers were often at the mercy of their maps. The self-driving cars of the future won’t be any different.

Autonomous vehicles will sport sophisticated sensors and radar systems to read and react to their surroundings, but their robotic drivers still will require vivid and current roadmaps to put the various inputs into context. And creating those maps will require intense collaboration among auto industry players, map makers, technology companies and government, along with a heavy dose of crowdsourcing, industry experts say.

Jim Keller, chief engineer for Honda R&D Americas Inc., sees a future in which cars and their various sensors will collect and share roadway data, updating maps with real-time information that would be used by all automakers ‘as a community’– akin to the Waze mobile navigation app, through which drivers alert one another to upcoming road closures, speed traps and traffic.

‘Mapping is going to be critical in the future,’ Keller said during an interview at the Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress here. ‘It’s almost a symbiotic relationship between the auto companies and what we need and what we’re asking from the maps.

‘Symbiotic means that we’re also going to be feeding the map makers with updated data and then using that same information to help us,’ Keller added. ‘It’s really a paradigm shift happening as we move forward related to mapping.'”

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Old Print Article: “Sons Of Millionaires Murdered Franks Boy In Desire For ‘Thrill'” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1924)

September 15, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even in the wake of the twin horrors of World War I and a global flu pandemic, the crimes of Nathan E. Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb couldn’t be easily comprehended. In 1924, the gifted, wealthy sons of the best of everything Chicago society had to offer, kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Robert Franks for the “thrill” of it all. It was nothing personal–they knew and liked the lad–they just desired to commit the “perfect crime.” Once arrested, the pair confessed to the premeditated brutality and were defended by Clarence Darrow, who kept them from the death house. Loeb was killed by a fellow prisoner, while Leopold was paroled in 1958 and subsequently moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked in medicine and education. Theories abounded at the time as to what drove their heinous act: poor parenting, improper moral education, overindulgence, an infatuation with science, manic depression, paranoia, sexual perversion, even too much Nietzsche. But it was likely a confluence of factors forever bound in a knot. The below article is from the June 1, 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

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“Not Only Are Leaks Of This Magnitude Still Possible, They Are An Inevitability”

September 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Julian Assange is an asshole, but so are a lot of useful people. Whistleblowers are vital in a free society, and I certainly don’t expect them to be perfect, but Assange is a messenger of such dubious character that it pollutes his message.

In today’s Gawker chat, Assange chose to not answer one of the best questions–“Given the collapse of your support since avoiding rape charges for several years, don’t you think that Wikileaks, as an organisation, would have been better served if you resigned?”–but he did respond to some others. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Dear Mr. Assange, through your efforts and that of Wikileaks as a whole, you have led to a new era of whistleblowing that has revealed the extent of America’s malfeasance across the globe. We have also seen the United States (and others) attempt to break down the safeguards that enabled individuals to leak information to you and others. Do you think after Manning and Snowden that leaks of such magnitude are still possible?

Julian Assange:

Not only are leaks of this magnitude still possible, they are an inevitability. And there’s more coming, not less. While Washington DC has tried to set general deterants, we’ve set general incentives. That’s why we beat them at their own game and got Snowden to safety. So he could keep his voice and through his example of relative freedom act as general incentive.

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Question:

Julian, do you think you have anything—anything at all—in common with Eric Schmidt?

Julian Assange:

Plenty – I discuss it a lot in the book, e.g.: “Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity. His questions often skipped to the heart of the matter, betraying a powerful nonverbal structural intelligence. It was the same intellect that had abstracted software-engineering principles to scale Google into a megacorp, ensuring that the corporate infrastructure always met the rate of growth. This was a person who understood how to build and maintain systems: systems of information and systems of people. My world was new to him, but it was also a world of unfolding human processes, scale, and information flows.”

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Question:

I feel you’ve done a great service to humanity for pulling the curtains back on corruption and lies. Do you have any ideas, or see any ways that the human race can change our ways to create a path towards more transparency, truthfulness, and doing what’s right?

Julian Assange:

One thing you can do, which is quite simple, is treat companies like Google and Facebook as the corporations they are. Lots of people – especially on the left – are aware of the ways in which corporations are exploitative and harmful. But there is a disconnect when it comes to Silicon Valley. Lots of people refuse to buy Coca Cola, but they don’t see any problem with having a Gmail account. I think that is changing lately, but we need a movement to divest from these corporations – which destroy privacy – and to build an alternative internet that isn’t as actively harmful to human interests.

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Question:

There was a piece in Slate last year about Google, that I kept thinking about with respect to this book, about how Google’s internal culture and goals are bound up in Star Trek. For example: Amit Singhal, the head of Google’s search rankings team, told the South by Southwest Interactive Festival that “The destiny of [Google’s search engine] is to become that Star Trek computer, and that’s what we are building.”

It makes sense to me in that there’s a real Camelot-era liberal pro-statist ideal underlying Star Trek’s vision of the future, and I’m curious what your sense was as to whether or not Eric Schmidt really buys into that. AND/OR I am curious to know how your idealized vision of the future differs from that Google Star Trek model.

Julian Assange:

I hadn’t seen that piece. At a glance, it reminds me of the discovery that the NSA had had the bridge of the Enterprise recreated. In my experience it is more reliable and fairer to look at peoples interests and expenditure rather than try to diagnose their inner mental state, as the latter often lets people project their own biases. As I say in the book, I found Eric Schmidt to be, as you would expect, a very sharp operator. If you read The New Digital Age, the apolitical futurism of Star Trek seems to fit what Schmidt writes quite well. I also quite liked this summary of Google’s vision for the future: “Google’s vision of the future is pure atom-age 1960s Jetsons fantasy, bubble-dwelling spiritless sexists above a ruined earth.”

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Question:

Russian FSB. You didn’t release that information, and today, you and the Russians are downright chummy, with you reportedly assisting Edward Snowden in his “travels” there, in spite of Russia’s considerable human rights and surveillance abuses. How do you square your relationship with Russia and your government transparency/anti-authoritarian goals?

Julian Assange:

This is the usual attempt to attack the messager because the message is indisputable. The approach would already be invalid at that level, but it is also strictly false. Many things you may perceive to be true about an individual or a nation are helpful rhetorical positions that spread around through one group or another like a virus. In the end the collection of these thought-viruses, or memes, reflects the psychological and political contours of the group in which it inhabits. We have published more than 600,000 documents relating to Russia. The US stranded him in Russia by cancelling his passport. The US State Department just keeps kicking own goals. It is not my fault, or Edward Snowden’s fault that they’re so incompetent.•

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“What If We Write Environmental Factors Back In To The Story Of Progress?”

September 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Industrial and Technological Revolutions have, in many ways, been great. We’re not only richer (most of us) materially, but information is so much richer as well. It’s been a mixed victory, however, a Pyrrhic one even, when you factor in environmental damage. From Jeremy Caradonna in the Atlantic:

“But what if we rethink the narrative of progress? What if we believe that the inventions in and after the Industrial Revolution have made some things better and some things worse? What if we adopt a more critical and skeptical attitude toward the values we’ve inherited from the past? Moreover, what if we write environmental factors back in to the story of progress? Suddenly, things begin to seem less rosy. Indeed, in many ways, the ecological crisis of the present day has roots in the Industrial Revolution. 

For instance, consider the growth of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere since 1750. Every respectable body that studies climate science, including NASA, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has been able to correlate GHG concentrations with the pollutants that machines have been spewing into the atmosphere since the late-18th century. These scientific bodies also correlate GHGs with other human activities, such as the clearing of forests (which releases a lot of carbon dioxide and removes a crucial carbon sink from the planet), and the breeding of methane-farting cows. But fossil fuels are the main culprit (coal, gas, and oil) and account for much of the increase in the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The main GHGs, to be sure, are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and a few others, many of which can be charted over time by analyzing the chemistry of long-frozen ice cores. More recent GHG levels are identified from direct atmospheric measurements.

What we learn from these scientific analyses is that the Industrial Revolution ushered in a veritable Age of Pollution, which has resulted in filthy cities, toxic industrial sites (and human bodies), contaminated soils, polluted and acidified oceans, and a ‘blanket’ of air pollution that traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, which then destabilizes climate systems and ultimately heats the overall surface temperature of the planet.”

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