“I’m Wondering If I’m In The Very Last Generation Of Workers”

May 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

After finishing this (often) funny book about an unfunny subject, I started on Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots (excellent so far), which wonders if this new machine age will differ from the Industrial Age by not creating newer, better jobs to replace those disappeared by automation. So perhaps I’m thinking even more than usual about technological unemployment, especially in regards to the service sector, which, as Ford reminds, is where most Americans earn a living now and which is most prone to robotization. It isn’t so much a fear stoked by where Deep Learning is right now but where it may be a decade on. If it advances rapidly, how do we proceed?

In a Los Angeles Times piece, Jon Healey is concerned about the same after attending the Milken Global Conference panel on robotics. The opening:

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the very last generation of newspaper reporters.

After hearing Jeremy Howard talk at a Milken Global Conference panel on robotics this week, however, I’m wondering if I’m in the very last generation of workers.

Howard is chief executive of Enlitic, which uses computers to help doctors make diagnoses. His technology relies on something known as machine learning, or the process by which a computer improves its own capabilities. He’s also a top data scientist, which gives him a much better view of what’s coming than most people have.

This year, Howard said, machines are better than humans at recognizing objects in an image. Now here’s the scary part. Compared to where they were in November, Howard said, they are 15 times faster in recognizing objects while being more accurate and using fewer computational resources. In five years, they will be 10,000 times faster.

“We are seeing order-of-magnitude improvements every few months,” Howard said. Similar leaps are starting to appear in computers’ ability to understand written text.

In five years’ time, a single computer could be hundreds or thousands of times better at that task than humans, Howard said. Combine it with other computers on a network, and the advantage becomes even more pronounced.

“Probably in your lifetime, certainly in your kids’ lifetime … computers will be better than humans at all these things,” he said. And within five years after that, they will be 1,000 times better.

Gulp.•

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“The Government, In Effect, Served As The Valley’s First Venture Capitalist”

May 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a wonderful Backchannel piece, historian Leslie Berlin answers two key questions: “Why did Silicon Valley happen in the first place, and why has it remained at the epicenter of the global tech economy for so long?”

Sharing granular details (before the name “Silicon Valley” was popularized in 1971, the area was known as “Valley of the Heart’s Delight”) and big-picture items (William Shockley’s genius drew talent to the community, and his bizarre paranoia dispersed them), Berlin provides a full-bodied sense of the place’s past, something she says continues to be of interest to the latest wave of technologists.

The short answer to the two questions posed is that there was confluence of technical, cultural and financial forces in this place in a relatively short span of time, and these same factors continue to sustain the area’s growth. (Oh, and immigration helps.) An excerpt from the “Money” section:

The third key component driving the birth of Silicon Valley, along with the right technology seed falling into a particularly rich and receptive cultural soil, was money. Again, timing was crucial. Silicon Valley was kick-started by federal dollars. Whether it was the Department of Defense buying 100% of the earliest microchips, Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed selling products to military customers, or federal research money pouring into Stanford, Silicon Valley was the beneficiary of Cold War fears that translated to the Department of Defense being willing to spend almost anything on advanced electronics and electronic systems. The government, in effect, served as the Valley’s first venture capitalist.

The first significant wave of venture capital firms hit Silicon Valley in the 1970s. Both Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers were founded by Fairchild alumni in 1972. Between them, these venture firms would go on to fund Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dropbox, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Genentech, Google, Instagram, Intuit, and LinkedIn — and that is just the first half of the alphabet.

This model of one generation succeeding and then turning around to offer the next generation of entrepreneurs financial support and managerial expertise is one of the most important and under-recognized secrets to Silicon Valley’s ongoing success. Robert Noyce called it “re-stocking the stream I fished from.” Steve Jobs, in his remarkable 2005 commencement address at Stanford, used the analogy of a baton being passed from one runner to another in an ongoing relay across time.•

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“DroneShield’s System Is Centred On A Sophisticated Listening Device”

May 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Friend, is your home drone-proof? Are you keeping surveillance cameras and potential flying explosives at bay? Do you realize that soon enough they’ll be the size of a flea and you won’t even be able to see these invaders? Act now!

From an Economist report about the fledgling anti-drone industry:

Detecting a small drone is not easy. Such drones are slow-moving and often low-flying, which makes it awkward for radar to pick them up, especially in the clutter of a busy urban environment. “Defeating” a detected drone is similarly fraught with difficulty. You might be able to jam its control signals, to direct another drone to catch or ram it, or to trace its control signals to find its operator and then “defeat” him instead. But all of this would need to take place, as far as possible, without disrupting local Wi-Fi systems (drones are often controlled by Wi-Fi), and it would certainly have to avoid any risk of injuring innocent bystanders.

Bringing down quads

One company which thinks itself up to fulfilling the detection part of the process is DroneShield, in Washington, DC. This firm was founded by John Franklin and Brian Hearing after Mr Franklin crashed a drone he was flying into his neighbours’ garden by accident, without them noticing. He realised then how easily drones could be used to invade people’s privacy and how much demand there might be for a system that could warn of their approach.

DroneShield’s system is centred on a sophisticated listening device that is able to detect, identify and locate an incoming drone based on the sound it makes. The system runs every sound it hears through a sonic “library,” which contains all the noises that are made by different types of drone. If it finds a match, it passes the detected drone’s identity and bearing to a human operator, who can then take whatever action is appropriate.

Other ways of detecting drones are also under investigation.•

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“The Internet Will Be Almost Fused With The Physical World”

May 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Quantifying our behavior is likely only half the task of the Internet of Things, with nudging us the other part of the equation. I don’t necessarily mean pointing us toward healthier choices we wouldn’t necessarily make (which is dubious if salubrious) but placing us even more inside a consumerist machine.

Somewhat relatedly: Quentin Hardy of the New York Times looks at how the data-rich tomorrow may mostly benefit the largest technology companies. An excerpt:

This sensor explosion is only starting: Huawei, a Chinese maker of computing and communications equipment with $47 billion in revenue, estimates that by 2025 over 100 billion things, including smartphones, vehicles, appliances and industrial equipment, will be connected to cloud computing systems.

The Internet will be almost fused with the physical world. The way Google now looks at online clicks to figure out what ad to next put in front of you will become the way companies gain once-hidden insights into the patterns of nature and society.

G.E., Google and others expect that knowing and manipulating these patterns is the heart of a new era of global efficiency, centered on machines that learn and predict what is likely to happen next.

“The core thing Google is doing is machine learning,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, said at an industry event on Wednesday. Sensor-rich self-driving cars, connected thermostats or wearable computers, he said, are part of Google’s plan “to do things that are likely to be big in five to 10 years. It just seems like automation and artificial intelligence makes people more productive, and smarter.”•

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Old Print Article: “Rockets To The Moon Envisioned By Science,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1940)

May 5, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We were aware, more than seven decades ago, that the moon could be a landing pad, a rocket launcher and a nonpareil space observatory. Our failure to execute in this area is one of will, not knowledge. An article follows about the moon and its uses (including being an airport of sorts) from the December 29, 1940 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

“I Feel A Little Bit Like Humanity Is A Bit Like An Infant Or A Teenager”

May 5, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s certainly disingenuous that the UK publication the Register plastered the word “EXCLUSIVE” on Brid-Aine Parnell’s Nick Bostrom interview, since the philosopher, who’s become widely known for writing about existential risks in his book Superintelligence, has granted many interviews in the past. The piece is useful, however, for making it clear that Bostrom is not a confirmed catastrophist, but rather someone posing questions about challenges we may (and probably will) face should our species continue in the longer term. An excerpt:

Even if we come up with a way to control the AI and get it to do “what we mean” and be friendly towards humanity, who then decides what it should do and who is to reap the benefits of the likely wild riches and post-scarcity resources of a superintelligence that can get us out into the stars and using the whole of the (uninhabited) cosmos.

“We’re not coming from a starting point of thinking the modern human condition is terrible, technology is undermining our human dignity,” Bostrom says. “It’s rather starting from a real fascination with all the cool stuff that technology can do and hoping we can get even more from it, but recognising that there are some particular technologies that also could bring risks that we really need to handle very carefully.

“I feel a little bit like humanity is a bit like an infant or a teenager: some fairly immature person who has got their hands on increasingly powerful instruments. And it’s not clear that our wisdom has kept pace with our increasing technological prowess. But the solution to that is to try to turbo-charge the growth of our wisdom and our ability to solve global coordination problems. Technology will not wait for us, so we need to grow up a little bit faster.”

Bostrom believes that humanity will have to collaborate on the creation of an AI and ensure its goal is the greater good of everyone, not just a chosen few, after we have worked hard on solving the control problem. Only then does the advent of artificial intelligence and subsequent superintelligence stand the greatest chance of coming up with utopia instead of paperclipped dystopia.

But it’s not exactly an easy task.•

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“Future Space Expeditions Will Resemble Sea Voyages Much More Than Test Flights”

May 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Last month, I blogged about a 1928 article which told of the demise of the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, so I would be remiss if I didn’t post a passage from “Moving to Mars,” Tom Kizzia’s wonderful New Yorker article which investigates NASA’s attempts to understand the isolating effects of a potential Mars mission, which uses the 1898 Antarctic voyage of the Belgica, of which Amundsen was a crewmember, as a seafaring parallel. That ship ran into major difficulties, among them the remoteness of the trip playing havoc with the minds of the discoverers. Kizzia visits a contemporary experiment in astronaut sequestration (and other pragmatic problems) in Hawaii (“Mauna Loa is our Martian mountain,” as it’s put), a federal study similar to what speliologist Michel Siffre attempted by his lonesome in the 1960s-70s. An excerpt:

A century after the Belgica’s return, a NASA research consultant named Jack Stuster began examining the records of the trip to glean lessons for another kind of expedition: a three-year journey to Mars and back.“Future space expeditions will resemble sea voyages much more than test flights, which have served as the models for all previous space missions,” Stuster wrote in a book, Bold Endeavors, which was published in 1996 and quickly became a classic in the space program. A California anthropologist, Stuster had helped design U.S. space stations by studying crew productivity in cases of prolonged isolation and confinement: Antarctic research stations, submarines, the Skylab station. The study of stress in space had never been a big priority at NASA—or of much interest to the stoic astronauts, who worried that psychologists would uncover some hairline crack that might exclude them from future missions. (Russia, by contrast, became the early leader in the field, after being forced to abort several missions because of crew problems.) But in the nineteen-nineties, with planning for the International Space Station nearly complete, NASA scientists turned their attention to journeys deeper into space, and they found questions that had no answers.“That kind of challenging mission was way out of our comfortable low-earth-orbit neighborhood,”Lauren Leveton, the lead scientist of NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance program, said. Astronauts would be a hundred million miles from home, no longer in close contact with mission control. Staring into the night for eight monotonous months, how would they keep their focus? How would they avoid rancor or debilitating melancholy?

Stuster began studying voyages of discovery—starting with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, whose deployment, he observed, anticipated the NASA-favored principle of “triple redundancy.” Crews united by a special “spirit of the expedition” excelled. HeO praised the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen’s three-year journey into the Arctic, launched in 1893, for its planning, its crew selection, and its morale. One icebound Christmas, after a feast of reindeer meat and cranberry jam, Nansen wrote in his journal that people back home were probably worried.“I am afraid their compassion would cool if they could look upon us, hear the merriment that goes on, and see all our comforts and good cheer.” Stuster found that careful attention to habitat design and crew compatibility could avoid psychological and interpersonal problems. He called for windows in spacecraft, noting studies of submarine crewmen who developed temporarily crossed eyes on long missions. (The problem was uncovered when they had an unusual number of automobile accidents on their first days back in port.) He wrote about remote-duty Antarctic posts suffering a kind of insomnia called “polar big eye,”which could be addressed by artificially imposing a diurnal cycle of light and darkness.

Bold Endeavors was a hit with astronauts, who carried photocopied pages into space, bearing Stuster’s recommendations on workload, cognitive impairment, and special celebration days. (He nominated the birthday of Jules Verne, whose fictional explorers headed to the moon with fifty gallons of brandy and a “vigorous Newfoundland.”) But historical analogies could take NASA only so far, Stuster argued. Before humans went to Mars, a final test should run astronauts through “high-fidelity mission simulations.”To the extent possible, these tests should be carried out in some remote environment, whose extreme isolation would bring to bear the stress and confinement of a journey to outer space.•

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“Not A Man To Do Things In Half-Measures, He Has Now Become An Orthodox Jew”

May 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In way or another, bigots are almost always the thing they hate.

It just isn’t always literally so as in the case of Hungarian politician Csanad Szegedi, who was a far-right anti-Semite, until discovering he was Jewish. That stunning revelation, which occurred three years ago, knocked him from his perch, forcing him to learn to walk again as an adult. Nick Thorpe of the BBC follows up with a report. An excerpt: 

He comes across a bit like the American singer Johnny Cash. “Hello, I’m Csanad Szegedi.” And the schoolchildren of the Piarist Secondary School in Szeged hang on every word.

“I’m speaking to you here today,” says the tall chubby faced man, with small, intelligent eyes, “because if someone had told me when I was 16 or 17 what I’m going to go tell you now, I might not have gone so far astray.”

As deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party in Hungary, Szegedi co-founded the Hungarian Guard – a paramilitary formation which marched in uniform through Roma neighbourhoods.

And he blamed the Jews, as well as the Roma, for the ills of Hungarian society – until he found out that he himself was one. After several months of hesitation, during which the party leader even considered keeping him as the party’s “tame Jew” as a riposte to accusations of anti-Semitism, he walked out.

Not a man to do things in half-measures, he has now become an Orthodox Jew, has visited Israel, and the concentration camp at Auschwitz which his own grandmother survived.•

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“Science Is Not A Linear March Forward”

May 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Every now and then something truly expeditious occurs in technology or science (e.g., the speed forward of driverless-car development in the aftermath of the 2004 “Debacle in the Desert“). But progress is generally maddeningly slow, at least when viewed from the perspective of our own lifespans. So when Transhumanists promise a-mortality in two decades or people smart enough to know better argue that Moore’s Law will magically make everything just great by 2030, feel free to look askance. 

Demonstrating this point: Sarah Zhang of Gizmodo scooped up an issue of Scientific American from a decade ago and measured the accuracy of the predictions on everything from stem cells to solar cells. It was not pretty. An excerpt:

I recently dig up the 2005 December issue of Scientific American and went entry by entry through the Scientific American 50, a list of the most important trends in science that year. I chose 2005 because 10 years seemed recent enough for continuity between scientific questions then and now but also long enough ago for actual progress. More importantly, I chose Scientific American because the magazine publishes sober assessments of science, often by scientists themselves. (Read: It can be a little boring, but it’s generally accurate.) But I also trusted it not to pick obviously frivolous and clickbaity things.

Number one on the list was a stem cell breakthrough that turned out to be one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud ever. (To be fair, it fooled everyone.) But the list held other unfulfilled promises, too: companies now defunct, an FBI raid, and many, many technologies simply still on the verge of finally making it a decade later. By my count, only two of its 16 medical discoveries of 2005 have resulted in a drug or hospital procedures so far. The rosy future is not yet here.

Science is not a linear march forward, as headlines seem to imply. Science is a long slow slog, and often a twisty one at that.•

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“Humans Will Be Teaming Up With Freight Robots In Real Warehouses”

May 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Your new robot coworkers are darling–and so efficient! They’ll relieve you of so many responsibilities. And, eventually, maybe all of them. For now, factory robots will reduce jobs only somewhat, as we work alongside them. But eventually the band will be broken up, the machines going solo. Even the workers manufacturing the robots will soon enough be robots.

In a Technology Review article, Tom Simonite takes a smart look at this transitional phase, as robots begin to gradually commandeer the warehouse. He focuses on Fetch, a company that makes robots versatile enough to be introduced into preexisting factories. An excerpt:

Freight is designed to help shelf pickers, who walk around warehouses pulling items off shelves to do things like fulfilling online shopping orders. As workers walk around gathering items from shelves, they can toss items into the crate carried by the robot. When an order is complete, a tap on a smartphone commands the robot to scoot its load off to its next destination.

Wise says that robot colleagues like these could make work easier for shelf pickers, who walk as much as 15 miles a day in some large warehouses. Turnover in such jobs is high, and warehouse operators struggle to fill positions, she says. “We can reduce that burden on people and have them focus on the things that humans are good at, like taking things off shelves,” says Wise.

However, Wise’s company is also working on a second robot designed to be good at that, too. It has a long, jointed arm with a gripper, is mounted on top of a wheeled base, and has a moving “head” with a depth camera similar to that found in the Kinect games controller. This robot, named Fetch, is intended to rove around a particular area of shelving, taking items down and dropping them into a crate carried by a Freight robot.•

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“We Have To Preserve History”

May 4, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I loved the Rem Koolhaas book Delirious New York, but I happened to be in Seattle in 2004 the week the Central Library he designed opened and I wasn’t really enamored of it the way I am many of his other works. It has an impressive exterior, but the interior felt like it was meant more to be looked at than utilized, though I guess that is the epitome of the modern library in a portable world, the best-case scenario, even–perhaps people will at least take a glance.

As his Fondazione Prada is set to open in Milan this month in a repurposed, century-old industrial space, the architect has become more focused on revitalization and preservation rather than outré original visions. From a Spiegel Q&A with him conducted by Marianne Wellershoff:

Kultur Spiegel:

Does a building need to have a certain age or degree of prominence for us to recognize it as important?

Rem Koolhaas:

The idea of preservation dates back to the beginning of the modern age. During the 19th century, people essentially felt that something had to be at least 2,000 years old to be worthy of preservation. Today, we already decide during the planning stages how long a building should exist. At first, historical monuments were deemed worthy of preservation, then their surroundings, then city districts and finally large expanses of space. In Switzerland the entire Rhaetian Railway has been added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The dimensions and repertoire of what is worthy of preserving have expanded dramatically.

Kultur Spiegel:

Were there structures in recent years that you think should have been better preserved?

Rem Koolhaas:

The Berlin Wall, for example. Only a few sections remain, because no one knew at the time how to deal with this monument. I find that regrettable.

Kultur Spiegel:

And what do you think of the concrete architecture of the 1960s, a style known as brutalism? Should it be protected or torn down?

Rem Koolhaas:

We should preserve some of it. It would be madness for an entire period of architectural history — that had a major influence on cities around the world — to disappear simply because we suddenly find the style ugly. This brings up a fundamental question: Are we preserving architecture or history?

Kultur Spiegel:

What is your answer?

Rem Koolhaas:

We have to preserve history.•

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

May 3, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

FERTILITY WATER – $15 (MIDWEST)

half gallons of water. it’s just water to us, but many people have drank the water that comes from our well and become pregnant…

one of our friends used in vitro to have their first child and tried for a second with in vitro and it didnt work, after drinking our water she gave birth to another child, with no drugs.

a couple moved in down the road from us and had not conceived in 8 years, stopped in for a visit and had some iced tea with our water, and now have a happy healthy boy.

WE HAVE NO WAY TO PROVE THIS WORKS, but being one of nine children from a couple who could not have children till they moved to this farm, i think it works.

at $15 per half gallon plus shipping it is worth a try.

“Almost All Of Us Were Invaders And Usurpers And Miscegenators”

May 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In “Ancient DNA Tells A New Human Story,” the “Saturday Essay” at the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley explains how “low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing” has allowed prehistory to come into sharper focus. The facts don’t speak well of humans (we were not nurturers in the big picture), though it does prove what a polyglot race we actually are. There’s also a lot to reveal about the unusual course diseases may have traveled from the earliest societies to the modern ones. An excerpt:

It turns out that, in the prehistory of our species, almost all of us were invaders and usurpers and miscegenators. This scientific revelation is interesting in its own right, but it may have the added benefit of encouraging people today to worry a bit less about cultural change, racial mixing and immigration.

Consider two startling examples of how ancient DNA has solved long-standing scientific enigmas. Tuberculosis in the Americas today is derived from a genetic strain of the disease brought by European settlers. That is no great surprise. But there’s a twist: 1,000-year-old mummies found in Peru show symptoms of TB as well. How can this be—500 years before any Europeans set foot in the Americas?

In a study published late last year in the journal Nature, Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and his colleagues found that all human strains of tuberculosis share a common ancestor in Africa about 6,000 years ago. The implication is that this is when and where human beings first picked up TB. It is much later than other scientists had thought, but Dr. Krause’s finding only deepened the mystery of the Peruvian mummies, since by then, their ancestors had long since left Africa.

Modern DNA cannot help with this problem, but reading the DNA of the tuberculosis bacteria in the mummies allowed Dr. Krause to suggest an extraordinary explanation. The TB DNA in the mummies most resembles the DNA of TB in seals, which resembles that of TB in goats in Africa, which resembles that of the earliest strains in African people. So perhaps Africans gave tuberculosis to their goats, which gave it to seals, which crossed the Atlantic and gave it to native Americans.•

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“New York Has Become Vastly More Suburban”

May 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Fran Lebowitz action figure.

Fran Lebowitz action figure.

As a lifelong New Yorker, I probably should feel guilty for saying in recent years that I think Los Angeles has become more interesting than NYC, but how can I be when even Fran Lebowitz, who was born on the jumpseat of a checker cab in Greenwich Village, has shifted her feelings on the rival metropolises?

A lot of the more creative, interesting people were driven out of New York by cost-of-living increases (particularly rents), and a lot of those who remain sit around and binge-watch TV on their iPads like everyone in every other place in the country. Sure, NYC is still more interesting than Cleveland, but was that really the goal?

From Alex Williams at T Magazine:

No less a New York mascot than Fran Lebowitz, whose jaded, cigarette-sucking visage may as well be inscribed on the city seal, also confessed to a change of heart about Los Angeles.

“L.A. is better than it used to be, New York is worse than it used to be,” Ms. Lebowitz said at a recent Vanity Fair party for the Tribeca Film Festival. The quality-of-life campaigns under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg swept away so much that was gritty, quirky or exceptional about the city, she said, and as a result, “New York has become vastly more suburban,” while “L.A. has become slightly less suburban.”

This is not a trivial point. Los Angeles is widely acknowledged to have become strikingly more cosmopolitan in recent years.•

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“Crowds Waited Eagerly For Him To Dispatch His Foes With His Trademark Sleeper Hold”

May 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ll guess that the New York Times’ wonderful obituarist Margalit Fox does not spend most of her waking hours focused on mid-20th-century professional wrestling, yet she’s written a brilliant postmortem about the recently deceased Verne Gagne, a star DuMont TV wrestler in the 1950s who ultimately ran his own Midwest promotion. That’s what an excellent reporter can do: They come to an unfamiliar topic, gather information and process it, and then quickly turn out something that seems to have been written by a longtime expert on the subject. Much easier said than done.

Here’s the only thing I know about Gagne: He happened upon the young Andre the Giant (not yet so nicknamed) in Japan 45 years ago and wanted to turn him into a “Great White Hope” boxer to take on the likes of Ali and Frazier. Not quite how it turned out.

From Fox:

A saloonkeeper’s son, LaVerne Clarence Gagne was born on Feb. 26, 1926, in Corcoran, Minn., near Minneapolis, and reared on a farm there. His mother died when he was 11; three years later, determined to wrestle despite his father’s insistence that he work in the saloon instead, he left home. Verne finished high school, where he wrestled and played football and baseball while living with an aunt and uncle.

At the University of Minnesota, he became a four-time heavyweight champion of the Big Nine, as the Big Ten Conference was then known, and an N.C.A.A. national champion. He also played football. Near the end of World War II he served stateside with the Marines, tapped by virtue of his wrestling skills to teach the men hand-to-hand combat.

In 1947 Gagne was a 16th-round draft pick by the Chicago Bears; he was later courted by the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers. But there was little money in pro football then, and he chose to earn his keep on the canvas.

In his first professional match, in 1949 in Minneapolis, Gagne defeated Abe Kashey, known as King Kong, and in the decades that followed Gagne traversed the country. Crowds waited eagerly for him to dispatch his foes with his trademark sleeper hold, which entailed grabbing an opponent’s head and pressing on his carotid artery so that he passed out — or at least gave a convincing impression of passing out.

In 1960, Gagne helped found the American Wrestling Association. Based in Minneapolis, the association promoted matches throughout the Midwest, Far West and Canada. Gagne, who later became the association’s sole owner, held the A.W.A. championship belt 10 times.

But in the 1980s, with the ascent of cable TV and its lucre, many of the nation’s star wrestlers, including Hogan and Ventura, were lured from their regional stables to the World Wrestling Federation, now a national behemoth known as World Wrestling Entertainment. The A.W.A. ceased operations in 1991; Gagne filed for personal bankruptcy in 1993.•

 

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A Brief Note From 1882 About A Volcano Ritual

May 3, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 22, 1882 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

volcano

“With Sufficient Inequality Of Outcome, Equality Of Opportunity Must Be Mirage”

May 3, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It would cost less to offer guaranteed paid work to unemployed Americans than to finance a social safety net, but there’s really no movement on either side of the aisle in Washington to aid the long-time unemployed, those left behind by the 2008 financial collapse and the growth of robotics. The problem has just been permitted to percolate.

In a Financial Times piece, Martin Wolf looks at two new titles about the haves and have-nots, Inequality: What Can be Done? by Anthony Atkinson and The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon. Interesting that the acceleration of inequality is most marked in the U.S. and U.K. and has not been shared by all other industrialized nations. France, in fact, has seen disparity decrease during the same timeframe. An excerpt: 

Both authors agree that something should be done about inequality. Atkinson provides a number of arguments for concern over rising inequality within rich countries. Some argue, for example, that only equality of opportunity matters. To this he responds that successful personal outcomes are often merely a matter of luck, that the structure of rewards is often grossly unfair and that, with sufficient inequality of outcome, equality of opportunity must be mirage.

Beyond this, argues Atkinson, unequal societies do not function well. The need to protect personal security or to incarcerate ever more people is likely to become a drag on economic performance and inimical to civilised life. If inequality becomes extreme, many will be unable to participate fully in their society. In any case, argues Atkinson, a pound in the hands of someone living on £10,000 a year must be worth more than it is to someone living on £1m. This does not justify complete equality, since the attempt to achieve it will impose costs. But it does mean that high inequality needs to be justified.

Atkinson goes far further, offering a programme of radical reform for the UK. It is not merely radical, but precise and (to the extent such a programme can be) costed. It starts from the argument that rising inequality “is not solely the product of forces outside our control. There are steps that can be taken by governments, acting individually or collectively, by firms, by trade union and consumer organisations, and by us as individuals to reduce the present levels of inequality.”What about policy? At the global level, both authors recommend improved and more generous aid. Bourguignon adds that properly managed trade has much to offer developing countries. Within countries, both authors call for higher taxes on wealth and incomes, and for better regulation, particularly of finance. Also important, they agree, will be policies directly addressed at improving educational outcomes for the disadvantaged.

Thus policy makers should develop a national pay policy, including a statutory minimum wage set at the “living wage,” and should also offer guaranteed public employment at that rate.•

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“That Makes Us The Family Pet”

May 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Goods and food made, served and delivered by humans will some day (and soon) be an artisanal and specialized field, the same way some still buy handmade shoes at a great expense, but most of us hop around on the machine-manufactured kind. That’s right, the wealthy will say, an actual lady’s hands touched my carrots! How smart!

Seriously, almost all of us are eventually being replaced at work by robots, with almost every task that can be automated being automated, and there’s no economic plan in place to deal with that onrushing reality. How do we reconcile a free-market economy with a highly automated one? Of course, I’m just talking about Weak AI. What happens if something stronger comes along, which will likely occur if we go on long enough? As the song says, we’ll make great pets. From recent Steve Wozniak comments reported by Brian Steele at MassLive:

“I love technology, to try it out myself,” said Wozniak. “I’ve got at least 5 iPhones. … I have some Android phones.”

He imagined a world in which these kinds of devices would be able to teach our children for us.

“A lot of our schools slow students down,” he said. “We put computers in schools and the kids don’t come out thinking any better.”

Rather than just putting more gadgets and gizmos in the classroom, he said, each classroom needs to have fewer students, and kids who are further ahead than their peers should be nurtured, not forced to fall in line.

Dismissing the concern over giving artificial intelligence too much intelligence, he said that’s already happened.

“The machines won 200 years ago. We made them too important,” said Wozniak. “That makes us the family pet.”•

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10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

May 3, 2015 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

Not in the face!

Not in the face!

  • 73-Year-Old Punches Bear In The Face To Save His Dogs
  • Jeff Bezos’ Rocket Looks Like A Penis
  • Kung-Fu Monkey Drop Kicks Some Jerk Who Gave It The Finger
  • Here’s What Really Happens At A Sex Party
  • I Dated A Married Couple
  • Truck Driver Trades $50,000 Worth Of Lunch Meat For Crack
  • How I Learned To Love 40 By Posing Naked (NSFW)
  • Would You Put Ketchup… In Your Hair?
  • How to Pimp The Right Way
  • Witches Are Selling Sex Spells On Etsy
That sex spell U sold over the Internet will bring unhappiness to the whole world.

That sex spell I sold over the Internet will bring unhappiness to the whole world.

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Seaches

May 2, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. what does francis ford coppola think about the future of film?
  2. when will robots walk among us?
  3. how is patty hearst like isis recruits?
  4. jack london’s experimental farm
  5. luther burbank’s experimental farm
  6. scarf heated electronically by your car as you drove
  7. is it legal to buy antibiotics in a bodega?
  8. texas oilman h.l. hunt
  9. sam biddle article about marc andreessen
  10. joan didion and john gregory dunne marriage

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

May 2, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, William and Kate had a daughter, who was immediately introduced to her wet nurse.


  • David Simon goes into depth over Baltimore’s race and class strife.
  • Bitcoin has a growing “laboratory” in Argentina.
  • The new TVs are able to listen to and process your conversations.

“You See A Terrorist On Television And He Looks Just Like A Terrorist”

May 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Terrorists dress the part now, aided by Hollywood editing techniques which help them satisfy expectations. And the rest of us also try to project an image virtually of who we want to be, if one not so horrifying. It’s neither quite real nor fake, just a sort of purgatory. It’s a variation of who we actually are–a vulgarization.

Here’s the transcription of a scene from 1981’s My Dinner with Andre, in which Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory discuss how performance had become introduced in a significant way into quotidian life, and that was long before Facebook gave the word “friends” scare quotes and prior to Reality TV, online identities and selfies:

Andre Gregory:

That was one of the reasons why Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well, that performing in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way, obscene. Isn’t it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? You see a terrorist on television and he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, single people or artists kind of live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father or single person or an artist should look and behave. They all act like that know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment, and they all seem totally self-confident. But privately people are very mixed up about themselves. They don’t know what they should be doing with their lives. They’re reading all these self-help books.

Wallace Shawn:

God, I mean those books are so touching because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though by performing all these roles in life we’re just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends. I mean, I mean, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things, but we just don’t dare to ask each other. 

Andre Gregory:

No, it would be like asking your friend to drop his role.

Wallace Shawn:

I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. On the contrary, this incredible emphasis we now put on our careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority, because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn’t matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead in a way. You can turn on the automatic pilot.•

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“The New Way For Human Beings To Move Forward Is Via Cyborgism”

May 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It doesn’t seem plausible to me that we’re on the cusp of a-mortality, no matter how many Transhumanists say they believe it to be so. My main disagreement with futurists is that they seem to always think the future is now, that any dream theoretically possible will soon be realized. Usually you have to work awhile to get there. 

But I’d be so happy my head would explode if Transhumanist Party Presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, was included in the major debates with Hillary and Marco and Jeb, so that he could discuss robot hearts and designer babies. He has as much chance to win the election as Ted Cruz but would be far more interesting to listen to. 

Two questions follow from Roby Guerra’s new h+ interview with Istvan.

___________________________

Roby Guerra:

Zoltan, Is knowledge the new food? Food for a new type of man of year the year 2000 and beyond? 

Zoltan Istvan:

The new way for human beings to move forward is via cyborgism, where we merge machine parts with the human body. This might include things like robotic hearts, artificial limbs, and mind reading headsets. These are the sorts of new technologies that will make up the modern human being moving forward.

___________________________

Roby Guerra:

If you were to get elected what would your practical policies be? In addition to supporting transhumanist projects?

Zoltan Istvan:  

The Transhumanist Party supports American values, prosperity, and security.

So the three primary things I would do if I became president are:

1) Attempt to do everything possible to make it so America’s amazing scientists and technologists have resources to overcome human death and aging within 15-20 years–a goal an increasing number of leading scientist think is reachable.

2) Create a cultural mind-set in America that embracing and producing radical technology and science is in the best interest of our nation and species.

3) Create national and global safeguards and programs that protect people against abusive technology and other possible planetary perils we might face as we transition into the transhumanist era.•

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“Soon, Rates Will Be Adjusted In Real Time”

May 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The quantified self certainly has its benefits, allowing us to detect illnesses early–perhaps eventually even anticipate them. We’ll have the ability to monitor our vitals and behavior whenever we like, but corporations may also have their telescope inside our bodies and minds. From Jacob Silverstein at the Baffler:

This month, John Hancock Insurance—whose patriotic namesake might be disappointed that the company is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian giant Manulife Financial—announced that it would distribute rebates to life insurance customers in exchange for access to their fitness monitor and location information.

IBM and Microsoft are marketing their cloud computing services to insurers, offering to crunch their data for them.

Car insurers like Progressive are discovering the value of real-time telematics data, culled from GPS units or special devices that can track whether you brake too hard. (Want to gag a little? Check out this British insurer using information from car computers to encourage motorists to “drive like a girl.”)

This is the first wave of insurance companies capitalizing on the explosion in personal data, and it looks to get worse. Trade publications are awash with rosy stories about the profits to be extracted from modifying premiums not just once or twice a year, but every day. Soon, rates will be adjusted in real time. As one insurance consultant told Forbes, “the healthier you get the lower your premiums go.” The corollary is that if you get sick or injured, or if you do anything that the insurer’s algorithms deem unhealthy, your premiums will increase.•

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“Overwhelmingly The Reason Why Drugs Are Banned Is Race Hysteria”

May 1, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve always traced the War on Drugs in the U.S. to the Nixon Administration, but British journalist Johann Hari, author of the new book Chasing the Scream, dates it to the end of Prohibition, particularly to bureaucrat Harry Anslinger, who later mentored Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Tent City infamy. He also reveals how intertwined crackdown was (and is) with racism. No shocker there.

The so-called War has been a huge failure tactically and financially and has criminalized citizens for no good reason. All the while, there’s been a tacit understanding that millions of Americans are hooked on Oxy and the like, dousing their pain with a perfectly legal script. These folks are far worse off than pot smokers, who are still afoul of the law in most states. I’m personally completely opposed to recreational drug use, but I feel even more contempt for the War on Drugs. It’s done far more harm than good.

Matthew Harwood of the ACLU interviews Hari at Medium. The opening:

Matthew Harwood:

So Chasing the Scream, what’s with the title?

Johann Hari:

The most influential person who no one has ever heard of is Harry Anslinger, the man who invented the modern War on Drugs — way before Nixon, way before Reagan. He’s the guy who takes over the Federal Bureau of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending. So, he inherits this big government department with nothing to do, and he basically invents the modern drug war to give his bureaucracy a purpose. For example, he had previously said marijuana was not a problem — he wasn’t worried about it, it wasn’t addictive — but he suddenly announces that marijuana is the most dangerous drug in the world, literally — worse than heroin — and creates this huge hysteria around it. He’s the first person to use the phrase “warfare against drugs.”

But he was driven by more than just trying to keep his large bureaucracy in work. When he was a little boy, he grew up in a place called Altoona in Pennsylvania, and he had this experience that really drove him all his life. He lived near a farmer and his wife, and one day, he goes to the farmhouse, and the farmer’s wife was screaming and asking for something. The farmer sent little Harry Anslinger to the local pharmacy to buy opiates — because of course opiates were legal. Harry Anslinger hurries back and gives the opiates to the farmer’s wife, and the farmer’s wife stops screaming. But he remembered this as this foundational moment where he realized the evils of drugs, and he becomes obsessed with eradicating drugs from the face of the earth. So I think of him as chasing this scream across the world. The tragedy is he created a lot of screams in turn.

It leads him to construct this global drug war infrastructure that we are all living with now. We are all living at end of the barrel of Harry Anslinger’s gun. He didn’t do it alone — I’m not a believer in the “Great Man Theory of History.” He could only do that because he was manipulating the fears of his time. But he played a crucial role.

Matthew Harwood:

We here at the ACLU look at the drug war and see that it has a disproportionate impact on communities of color. You find, however, that this war was pretty racist from the beginning.

Johann Hari:

If you had said to me four years ago, “Why were drugs banned?” I would have assumed it for the reasons people would give today — because you don’t want kids to use them or you don’t want people to become addicted. What’s striking when you look at the archives from the time is that almost never comes up. Overwhelmingly the reason why drugs are banned is race hysteria.•

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