“Steve Believed The World Was Going Mobile, And He Was Right”

January 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s good stuff in James B. Stewart’s New York Times piece “How, And Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft,” though it oversimplifies the reasons for the heavenly resuscitation of Jobs’ near-dead company and the purgatory Bill Gates’ once-mighty empire is now experiencing. In one passage, it reduces the reversal of fortunes to a “vision thing,” making it seem as if Gates was taken unawares by a mobile-dominated future. Oh, Gates knew. From his 1995 book The Road Ahead: 

What do you carry on your person now? Probably at least keys, identification, money, and a watch. And maybe credit cards, a checkbook, traveler’s checks, an address book, an appointment book, a notepad, something to read, a camera, a pocket tape recorder, a cellular phone, a pager, concert tickets, a map, a compass, a calculator, an electronic entry card, photographs, and maybe a loud whistle to call for help.

You’ll be able to keep equivalent necessities — and more — in an information appliance I call the wallet PC. It will be about the same size as a wallet, which means you’ll be able to carry it in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, and play both simple and sophisticated games. At a meeting, you might take notes, check your appointments, browse information if you’re bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call-up photos of your kids.•

The real distinction between the companies wasn’t vision but execution. Microsoft was too huge to pivot, though Apple might have won even if its rival wasn’t “encumbered” by success. From Stewart:

The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But Apple’s was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person’s desk, a radical idea when IBM mainframes took up entire rooms. But Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. That computer also just happened to be a phone, the most ubiquitous consumer device in the world. Apple ended up disrupting two huge markets.

“Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories,” [Bernstein analyst Toni] Sacconaghi said. “Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult. It’s the equivalent of Pixar producing one hit after another. You have to give kudos to Apple.”

Walter Isaacson, who interviewed Mr. Jobs for his biography of the Apple co-founder and chief executive, said: “Steve believed the world was going mobile, and he was right. And he believed that beauty matters. He was deeply moved by beautiful design. Objects of great functionality also had to be objects of desire.”•

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“At The Moment, These Are Science Fiction Stories”

January 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Demis Hassabis, the Google Deep Learning expert recently interviewed by Steven Levy, is also queried by Murad Ahmed in the Financial Times. He argues what I suspect to be true: Machine consciousness isn’t anywhere on the horizon though not theoretically impossible. An excerpt:

A modern polymath, the 38-year-old’s career has already included spells as a child chess prodigy, master computer programmer, video games designer and neuroscientist. Four years ago, these experiences led him to start DeepMind, an AI company that, he says, has the aim of making “machines smart.”

For some, this is a utopic idea — a world aided by super-smart digital assistants working to solve humanity’s most pressing problems, from disease to climate change. Others warn of a grim Armageddon, with cognisant robots becoming all too aware of human limitations, then moving to crush their dumb creators without emotion.

Hassabis, wearing a figure-hugging black top and dark-rimmed glasses, blends in at Hakkasan, where the decor is mostly black and the lighting minimal. He tells me he knows the place well — it’s where he took executives from Google, during a series of meetings that led to the search giant paying £400m for his fledgling company a year ago. Google is betting Hassabis may be able to unlock the secrets of the mind.

“It’s quite possible there are unique things about humans,” he argues. “But, in terms of intelligence, it doesn’t seem likely. With the brain, there isn’t anything non-computable.” In other words, the brain is a computer like any other and can, therefore, be recreated. Traits previously considered innate to humans — imagination, creativity, even consciousness — may just be the equivalent of software programs. …

Hassabis argues that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. “It’s very, very far in the future from the kinds of things we’re currently dealing with, which is playing Pong on Atari,” he says. “I think the next four, five, 10 years, we’ll have a lot more information about what these systems do, what kind of computations they’re creating, how to specify the right goals. At the moment, these are science fiction stories. Yes, there’s no doubt that AI is going to be a hugely powerful technology. That’s why I work on it. It has the power to provide incredible advances for humanity.”

Too soon then, to be worrying about how to wage war with a sentient robot army? “In our research programme, there isn’t anything that says ‘program consciousness,’ ” he says.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 30, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Got a eighth of shrooms. Care to split it?

The title says it all. I posted this before and it failed. So I’m trying again. I recently acquired an eighth of shrooms. And I want someone to do it with.

After a bit of chit chat of course.

You might just need to bring weed. There’s no strings, no sex involved even. Just a intimate trip with someone.

Interested?

“It Was Only In The Last 100,000 Years That Man Jumped To The Top Of The Food Chain”

January 29, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Got my hands on an early copy of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind yesterday, and I haven’t been able to put it down. The ideas are many, rich and often contrarian. You might not anticipate a book with that title being a page-turner, but it definitely is. Its drop date in the U.S. is February 10, and I highly recommend it. One brief passage from the opening section:

One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow. Some researchers believe this was our original niche. Just as woodpeckers specialise in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialised in extracting marrow from bones. Why marrow? Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe. You wait patiently until they’re done. But it’s still not your turn because first the hyenas and jackals – and you don’t dare interfere with them – scavenge the leftovers. Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right – and dig into the only edible tissue that remained.

This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. The position of humans in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. It was only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

That spectacular leap had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.•

 

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“To Combat The Concept Of The Tech Bro, There Must Be A Tech Sisterhood”

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

I don’t want to be around anyone who’s an asshole, male or female, but it’s clear that it’s mostly men who can get away with such poor behavior, even be celebrated for it. For proof, look no further than the technology sector. On that topic, an excerpt from “The Difference Machine,” some of Molly Lambert’s typically excellent thinking and writing at Grantland:

When computing was considered drudgery, women played a significant role. They were hired to be “human computors” who carried out math problems and solved equations before machines that could do so existed. During World War II, women were drafted into theElectronic Numerical Integrator and Computer program, where they worked as human “computers.”The women of ENIAC — including Betty Jean Jennings, Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Ruth Lichterman, Fran Bilas, and Marlyn Wescoff — were drafted into service as programmers. Snyder wrote SORT/MERGE, the first generative programming system. The women of ENIAC did much of the work but received little credit for it; the Army downplayed their involvement. Once programming became seen as a creative art rather than a rote secretarial one, women were not as welcome. (The Innovators also covers the women of ENIAC in detail, and discusses exactly how programming evolved from being seen as rote flip-switching to an intellectual endeavor.)

Women in tech today are taking a more direct approach to confronting issues of gender inequality. Rooting out the exact causes and conspirators who keep women on tech’s sidelines is difficult, because most forms of prejudice are deeply ingrained and subtly enforced. The solution, at least in part, may come from increasing the visibility of the issues. Tracy Chou, a Pinterest programmer and rising star in tech, has begun asking companies to release the data on their own internal makeup so that it can be tracked. The dismal statistics — women making up 17 percent of the workforce in technology- or engineering-related jobs at Google, 15 percent at Facebook, 9 percent at Mozilla — demonstrate that female engineers and programmers who felt alienated and underrepresented were not imagining things. To combat the concept of the tech bro, there must be a tech sisterhood. Tech history is not a chain of command, it’s a crazy quilt — no machine is ever really built by one person alone. It would be a mistake to consider Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper as just lone geniuses — the same way it is a mistake to think that way of the men.•

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“On A Typical Day, She Might Produce 15,000 Words; On A Very Good Day, 30,000”

January 29, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

A neurophysiological researcher at Yale, Colleen McCullough turned to writing at 37 as a second career and made it her first, producing with The Thorn Birds, a book about illicit love between a married woman and a priest, a career-defining success. Where did a story of such forbidden passion come from? Well, she was the daughter of a bigamist who had at least three wives at the same time. Listen, as an author she wasn’t Carson McCullers, but she didn’t need to be: Her heart was its own kind of lonely hunter. From her New York Times obituary, penned by the excellent Margalit Fox:

On a typical day, Ms. McCullough said, she might produce 15,000 words; on a very good day, 30,000. Her facility was all the more noteworthy in that she continued to use an electric typewriter well into the computer age.

“I spell perfectly,” she told The Inquirer in the 1996 article. “My grammar’s very good. My sentence construction is excellent. So I don’t have a lot of mistakes.” …

As a girl, Ms. McCullough dreamed of becoming a doctor. She entered medical school at the University of Sydney but was forced to abandon her studies after she developed a severe allergy to the soap widely used in Australian hospitals. She trained instead in neurophysiology, which is concerned with testing for and diagnosing neuromuscular diseases.

In the late 1960s, after working at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, Ms. McCullough accepted a position as a neurophysiological research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine. Discovering that she was being paid less than her male colleagues there, she cast about for another source of income.

“I loved being a neurophysiologist, but I didn’t want to be a 70-year old spinster in a cold-water walk-up flat with one 60-watt light bulb, which is what I could see as my future,” she told The California Literary Review in 2007.

Interested in writing since girlhood, she took to her typewriter.•

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“Here’s My Question… What Changed?”

January 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I’ll always remember what that staunch supporter or meritocracy Charles Murray replied when asked by the New York Times Magazine in 2008 about a certain Wasilla-based Republican:

NYT: What do you think of Sarah Palin? Charles Murray: I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.

All because she stood up at a convention and read a speech someone else wrote that was full of lies. Can you imagine if the Obamas had behaved like the Palins for the past six years, what odious theories Murray would have espoused? 

At the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis, apparently the last person in America to get the memo that even staunch conservatives have long disdained the adult baby who (briefly) governed Alaska, belatedly announces the love affair is over. You don’t say? It’s a perplexing missive from deep inside an echo chamber. The opening:

Has conservative genuflection at the altar of Sarah Palin finally come to a halt?

In case you missed it, her speech in Iowa this week was not well received on the right. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York called it a “long, rambling, and at times barely coherent speech” and National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke said she slipped into self-parody. And there’s more. The Examiner’s Eddie Scarry, for example, contacted several conservative bloggers who were once Palin fans, but have since moved on.

But here’s my question… what changed?

Yes, in 2008, Sarah Palin delivered one of the finest convention speeches I’ve ever heard (trust me, I was there), but she hasn’t exactly been channeling Winston Churchill ever since. Remember her big speech at CPAC a couple of years ago? You know, the one where she took a swig out of a Big Gulp and said of her husband Todd: “He’s got the rifle, I got the rack.” Not exactly a great moment in political rhetoric.

So why is anyone surprised when, this weekend, she said: “‘The Man,’ can only ride ya when your back is bent?”

Demosthenes, she is not, but there’s nothing new about Palin’s penchant for populism or lowbrow rhetoric. What does feel new is that she has finally gotten around to roundly losing conservative opinion leaders. (OK, this has been a long time coming. In 2011, Conor Friedersdorf noted that the hard right was skewering Palin, and that Kathleen Parker had been vindicated. And as recently as this past April, I wondered whether it was finally safe for conservatives to criticize her publicly. But it does feel like we have finally reached a tipping point where criticizing Palin isn’t only acceptable for conservative opinion leaders, it’s now almost expected.)•

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“There Is Actually A Technology That Does All Of This — Solar Carports”

January 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Will the survival of life as we know it on Earth become affordable before it’s too late? When will extinction avoidance achieve its price point? From Chris Mooney of the Washington Post:

America is a nation of pavement. According to research conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, most cities’ surfaces are 35 to 50 percent composed of the stuff. And 40 percent of that pavement is parking lots. That has a large effect: Asphalt and concrete absorb the sun’s energy, retaining heat — and contributing to the “urban heat island effect,” in which cities are hotter than the surrounding areas.

So what if there were a way to cut down on that heat, cool down the cars that park in these lots, power up those parked cars that are electric vehicles (like Teslas), and generate a lot of energy to boot? It sounds great, and there is actually a technology that does all of this — solar carports.

It’s just what it sounds like — covering up a parking lot with solar panels, which are elevated above the ground so that cars park in the shade beneath a canopy of photovoltaics. Depending of course on the size of the array, you can generate a lot of power. For instance, one vast solar carport installation at Rutgers University is 28 acres in size and produces 8 megawatts of power, or about enough energy to power 1,000 homes.

Solar carports have many benefits, ranging from aesthetics (yes, the things look very cool) to subtler factors. Like this: Not having to return to a hot car after spending three hours at the mall or a sporting event in the summer. In fact, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy, being able to park in the shade in the summer is actually a substantial contributor to increased vehicle fuel efficiency, because it saves having to cool your car back up by cranking the air conditioner.

So what’s the downside here? And why aren’t solar parking lots to be found pretty much everywhere you turn?

In a word, the problem is cost.•

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“What If The Reality Is That The Underlying Cause Of Mass Murder Lies Not In Something External To Ourselves?”

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

A thing that worries me about Americans right now–and people all around the world, really–is the surfeit of ego, how dearly people need to be respected or else, how little work we’ve done on ourselves internally that we can’t be happy from within about who we are. If you need mass approval, you need too much. The Internet has opened up the media to all, which is wonderful and egalitarian, but it simultaneously opened a Pandora’s box. Not to say that the new platforms are responsible for any type of shocking violence, but there exists beneath it a scary undercurrent; a tool can be a weapon depending on how you swing it. In yet another great Aeon essay, “Running Amok,” Joseph Pierre considers the trigger effect behind mass shootings in the U.S., which he believes are provoked by more than mental illness or guns or video games. The opening:

A movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. The Washington Navy Yard. The college town of Isla Vista, California. Most of us recognise these as US sites of recent mass murder, loosely defined as the intentional killing of more than four people in a single incident. Unlike the casualties of war or gang-related murders carried out in inner cities, these acts of domestic terrorism strike a particular brand of fear in the hearts of Americans because they seem to be random acts committed in places where such behaviour is unexpected.

Naturally, we respond by trying to pinpoint the cause: bad parenting, mental illness, guns, video games, the media, heavy metal music, or just plain evil. Once some ‘other’ is identified as an offending agent, we set up a kind of quarantine so that it can be banished from society and no longer threaten. Hoping to allay fears and respond to emotionally charged demands for action, politicians jump on this or that bandwagon with proposals for legislation aimed at sequestering and eliminating would-be culprits. Then we go about our lives, until the next mass shooting occurs and the cycle is repeated.

In the short term, this process makes us feel safer than looking inward and thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ But what if the reality is that the underlying cause of mass murder lies not in something external to ourselves, but rather something at the root of human instinct and behaviour that’s also interwoven into American popular culture? This possibility suggests that, rather than trying to get rid of some offending external agent, a more meaningful approach might require looking within ourselves and our own communities for a solution.

In support of this idea, James Fox and Monica DeLateur, criminologists at Northeastern University, published a paper last year in Homicide Studies that dispels some myths about mass shootings and calls into question our tendency to blame things outside of ourselves. To begin with, the authors note that ‘mass shootings have not increased in number or death toll, at least not over the past several decades’. They then go on to demythologise a number of common assumptions about mass shootings. Contrary to popular opinion after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, in which two schoolboys murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher, violent entertainment doesn’t seem to be a significant cause of mass murder. In terms of interventions, neither tighter gun control nor arming our schools are likely to reduce mass shootings. Even expanded efforts at profiling would-be mass murderers or enhancing mental health services might be futile. Needless to say, these conclusions aren’t very encouraging and the authors end by suggesting that we ought to continue ineffective responses in any case because ‘doing something is better than nothing’.•

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“The Floor Is Automatically Cleaned, Too”

January 29, 2015 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The image of the retrofuture Roomba I used for this post reminded me of the 1957 Whirlpool “Miracle Kitchen” video. The vacuum of tomorrow is on display at 11:50.

“The Idea Is That An Oncoming Robotic Revolution Is Coming Whether We Like It Or Not”

January 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A follow-up post to the David Graeber video about so-called bullshit jobs, here are excerpts from two articles about modern employment, one from Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times which looks at the Uberization of work and the other by Joshua Krook of New Intrigue which focuses on labor in a highly automated world.

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From New Intrigue:

The Robotic (Post-Industrial) Revolution:

There is something very curious about politicians constantly obsessing over people getting jobs in the light of the oncoming Robot Revolution.

Now you might think I’m crazy for believing in such things, but then you will have to call the likes of Stephen Hawking crazy too, which is a much, much more difficult task.

There are already articles on the web asking: “What will happen when Robots Take our Jobs?” The idea is that an oncoming robotic revolution is coming whether we like it or not.

And with it, the capacity of robots to do the jobs typically reserved for humans – including high-end, white-collar professional work. The latest robotic innovations out of Japan can play ping pong (“and even decide to take it easy on opponents by missing a few hits”), use sign language to “talk” to humans and “mimic simple greetings.” This is only the beginning.

Despite almost every single instinct of intuition in my body saying that robots will make our lives easier, which is what we’ve been taught (using examples like the washing machine in the 1950s) –by freeing up our time and allowing us to work on things that aren’t menial, boring office jobs– we have to look to history here and realise that that seems like an unlikely outcome. History has a few examples where this is true, but on the whole it has gone the other way, and this time round…

It may even go the other way.•

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From the New York Times:

Various companies are now trying to emulate Uber’s business model in other fields, from daily chores like grocery shopping and laundry to more upmarket products like legal services and even medicine.

“I do think we are defining a new category of work that isn’t full-time employment but is not running your own business either,” said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who has studied the rise of the so-called on-demand economy, and who is mainly optimistic about its prospects.

Uberization will have its benefits: Technology could make your work life more flexible, allowing you to fit your job, or perhaps multiple jobs, around your schedule, rather than vice versa. Even during a time of renewed job growth, Americans’ wages are stubbornly stagnant, and the on-demand economy may provide novel streams of income.

“We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the work force would do a portfolio of things to generate an income — you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit,” Dr. Sundararajan said.

But the rise of such work could also make your income less predictable and your long-term employment less secure. And it may relegate the idea of establishing a lifelong career to a distant memory.

“I think it’s nonsense, utter nonsense,” said Robert B. Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley who was the secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. “This on-demand economy means a work life that is unpredictable, doesn’t pay very well and is terribly insecure.” After interviewing many workers in the on-demand world, Dr. Reich said he has concluded that “most would much rather have good, well-paying, regular jobs.”•

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“There Are Whole Industries That Don’t Really Need To Exist”

January 28, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

David Graeber in a recent British TV appearance explaining why pointless jobs–bullshit jobs, to be more frank–persist in a much more automated world. What happened to the Keynesian dream of a leisure-driven life? The anthropologist’s answer is that not only are many jobs busywork but so are whole industries (telemarketing, lobbying, etc.) His prescription: the basic-income solution.

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“In The Future, We’d Like To Have More Than 90 Percent Of Hotel Services Operated By Robots”

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

Aloft Hotels is already supplementing its human staff (i.e., reducing it) with robots that deliver sundries, and now a theme-park lodging opening in Nagasaki in July is going a step further in injecting silicon into its system, employing Weak AI to do all the grunt work, from robotic arms in the cloak room to facial recognition “keys” for room doors to android receptionists at the front desk. From the Japan Times:

NAGASAKI – A hotel with robot staff and face recognition instead of room keys will open this summer in Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki Prefecture, the operator of the theme park said Tuesday.

The two-story Henn na Hotel is scheduled to open July 17. It will be promoted with the slogan “A Commitment for Evolution,” Huis Ten Bosch Co. said.

The name reflects how the hotel will “change with cutting-edge technology,” a company official said. This is a play on words: “Henn” is also part of the Japanese word for change.

Robots will provide porter service, room cleaning, front desk and other services to reduce costs and to ensure comfort.

There will be facial recognition technology so guests can enter their rooms without a key.

“We will make the most efficient hotel in the world,” company President Hideo Sawada told a news conference. “In the future, we’d like to have more than 90 percent of hotel services operated by robots.”•

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A Brief Note From 1894 About A Denial

January 28, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 22, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Highly sensational stories stating that H.K. Williamson, a business man of Mineola, was horsewhipped in the railroad station by his wife yesterday afternoon and that a young woman with whom he was going away shared in the punishment are without any foundation whatsoever.•

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“Does It Really Matter Whether We Maintain Our Navigational Sense Or Offload It To A Machine?”

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

The Penguin blog has a Nicholas Carr essay about modern navigation devices and the effect they have on the “maps” in our brains, “Welcome to Nowheresville,” which is adapted from a piece of his most recent book, The Glass Cage. Carr is one of those blessed thinkers I always enjoy reading whether I agree with him or not. I don’t necessarily share his concerns about how GPS is redefining what it is to be human (we’ve always been and always will be fluidly defined) or “skill fade” causing transportation fatalities (the net number of such deaths will likely decline as travel becomes more autonomous), but it’s certainly worth considering the unknown neurological consequences of offloading our piloting skills. Are we unwittingly creating a new mismatch disease? An excerpt:

A loss of navigational acumen can have dire consequences for airline pilots and lorry drivers. Most of us, in our daily routines of driving and walking and otherwise getting around, are unlikely to find ourselves in such perilous spots. Which raises the obvious question: Who cares? As long as we arrive at our destination, does it really matter whether we maintain our navigational sense or offload it to a machine? Those of us living in lands crisscrossed by well marked roads and furnished with gas stations, motels, and 7-Elevens long ago lost both the custom of and the capacity for prodigious feats of wayfinding. Our ability to perceive and interpret topography, especially in its natural state, is already much reduced. Paring it away further, or dispensing with it altogether, doesn’t seem like such a big deal, particularly if in exchange we get an easier go of it.

But while we may no longer have much of a cultural stake in the conservation of our navigational prowess, we still have a personal stake in it. We are, after all, creatures of the earth. We’re not abstract dots proceeding along thin blue lines on computer screens. We’re real beings in real bodies in real places. Getting to know a place takes effort, but it ends in fulfillment and in knowledge. It provides a sense of personal accomplishment and autonomy, and it also provides a sense of belonging, a feeling of being at home in a place rather than passing through it. …

The harder people work at building cognitive maps of space, the stronger their underlying memory circuits seem to become. They can actually grow grey matter in the hippocampus—a phenomenon documented in cab drivers—in a way that’s analogous to the building of muscle mass through physical exertion.

But when they simply follow turn-by-turn instructions in “a robotic fashion,” Bohbot warns, they don’t “stimulate their hippocampus” and as a result may leave themselves more susceptible to memory loss. Bohbot worries that, should the hippocampus begin to atrophy from a lack of use in navigation, the result could be a general loss of memory and a growing risk of dementia. “Society is geared in many ways toward shrinking the hippocampus,” she told an interviewer. “In the next twenty years, I think we’re going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.”•

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“Milgram Was A Fantastic Dramaturg”

January 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Fifty years after Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience” study at Yale shocked the world, there’s dispute as to whether the Milgram experiment actually proved casual inhumanity is our default mode. Technologists like Jonah Peretti swear by Milgram, whereas others have begun to swear at him. From Cari Romm at the Atlantic:

To mark the 50th anniversary of the experiments’ publication (or, technically, the 51st), the Journal of Social Issues released a themed edition in September 2014 dedicated to all things Milgram. “There is a compelling and timely case for reexamining Milgram’s legacy,” the editors wrote in the introduction, noting that they were in good company: In 1964, the year after the experiments were published, fewer than 10 published studies referenced Milgram’s work; in 2012, that number was more than 60.

It’s a trend that surely would have pleased Milgram, who crafted his work with an audience in mind from the beginning. “Milgram was a fantastic dramaturg. His studies are fantastic little pieces of theater. They’re beautifully scripted,” said Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews and a co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues’ special edition. Capitalizing on the fame his 1963 publication earned him, Milgram went on to publish a book on his experiments in 1974 and a documentary, Obedience, with footage from the original experiments.

But for a man determined to leave a lasting legacy, Milgram also made it remarkably easy for people to pick it apart. The Yale University archives contain boxes upon boxes of papers, videos, and audio recordings, an entire career carefully documented for posterity. Though Milgram’s widow Alexandra donated the materials after his death in 1984, they remained largely untouched for years, until Yale’s library staff began to digitize all the materials in the early 2000s. Able to easily access troves of material for the first time, the researchers came flocking.

“There’s a lot of dirty laundry in those archives,” said Arthur Miller, a professor emeritus of psychology at Miami University and another co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues. “Critics of Milgram seem to want to—and do find—material in these archives that makes Milgram look bad or unethical or, in some cases, a liar.”•

_________________________________

“Oh, I’m not going to kill that man.”

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“Will Belief In The Gods Endure? It Will Not.”

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

Looking into a post-human future, John G. Messerly of the Institute of Ethics & Emerging Technologies sees no room for religion, though our devotion may just morph. The opening:

History is littered with dead gods. The Greek and Roman gods, and thousands of others have perished. Yet Allah, Yahweh, Krishna and a few more survive. But will belief in the gods endure? It will not. Our descendents will be too advanced to share such primitive beliefs.

If we survive and science progresses, we will manipulate the genome, rearrange the atom, and augment the mind. And if science defeats suffering and death, religion as we know it will die. Without suffering and death, religion will have lost its raison d’être. For who will pray for heavenly cures, when the cures already exist on earth? Who will die hoping for a reprieve from the gods, when science offers immortality? With the defeat of death, science and technology will have finally triumphed over superstition. Our descendents will know, once and for all, that they are stronger than imaginary gods.

As they continue to evolve our post-human progeny will become increasingly godlike. They will overcome human physical and psychological limitations, and achieve superintellgence, either by modifying their brains or interfacing with computers. While we can’t know this for sure, what we do know is that the future will not be like the past. From our perspective, if science and technology continue to progress, our offspring will come to resemble us about as much as we do the amino acids from which we sprang.

As our descendents distance themselves from their past, they will lose interest in the gods. Such primitive ideas may even be unthinkable for them. Today the gods are impotent, tomorrow they’ll be irrelevant. You may doubt this. But do you really think that in a thousand or a million years your descendents, travelling through an infinite cosmos with augmented minds, will find their answers in ancient scriptures? Do you really think that powerful superintelligence will cling to the primitive mythologies that once satisfied ape-like brains? Only the credulous can believe such things. In the future gods will exist … only if we become them.

Still the future is unknown. Asteroids, nuclear war, environmental degradation, climate change or deadly viruses and bacteria may destroy us. Perhaps the machine intelligences we create will replace us. Or we might survive but create a dystopia. None of these prospects is inviting, but they all entail the end of religion.•

“There Will Be More Progress In The Next 30 Years Than Ever”

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

Bill Gates’ AMAs at Reddit are always fun, wide-ranging affairs. Below are some early exchanges from one he’s currently doing.

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Question:

In your opinion, has technology made the masses less intelligent?

Bill Gates:

Technology is not making people less intelligent. If you just look at the complexity people like in Entertainment you can see a big change over my lifetime. Technology is letting people get their questions answered better so they stay more curious. It makes it easier to know a lot of topics which turns out to be pretty important to contribute to solving complex problems.

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Question:

2015 will mark the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows. What do you think the next 30 years holds in terms of technology? What will personal computing will look like in 2045?

Bill Gates:

There will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever. Even in the next 10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively.

One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model – the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices.

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Question:

What do you think has improved life the most in poor countries in the last 5 years?

Bill Gates:

Vaccines make the top of the list. Being able to grow up healthy is the most basic thing. So many kids get infectious diseases and don’t develop mentally and physically. I was in Berlin yesterday helping raise $7.5B for vaccines for kids in poor countries. We barely made it but we did which is so exciting to me!

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Question:

What is your opinion on bitcoins or cyptocurency as a whole? Also do you own any yourself?

Bill Gates:

Bitcoin is an exciting new technology. For our Foundation work we are doing digital currency to help the poor get banking services. We don’t use bitcoin specifically for two reasons. One is that the poor shouldn’t have a currency whose value goes up and down a lot compared to their local currency. Second is that if a mistake is made in who you pay then you need to be able to reverse it so anonymity wouldn’t work.

Overall financial transactions will get cheaper using the work we do and Bitcoin related approaches.

Making sure that it doesn’t help terrorists is a challenge for all new technology.

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Question:

Is there anything in life that you regret doing or not doing?

Bill Gates:

I feel pretty stupid that I don’t know any foreign languages. I took Latin and Greek in High School and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these – probably French because it is the easiest. I did Duolingo for awhile but didn’t keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students – incredible.

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Question:

What do you think about life-extending and immortality research?

Bill Gates:

It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit.•

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“The Parents Were Worried About Evil In the World And Wanted To Escape From ‘Impending Doom'”

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

Some people can be citizens of the world and do evil and others can live cloistered in their homes and do good, but there’s a great danger in recusing ourselves from the wider world. It’s hard enough to understand this spinning planet when we’re in its midst and that much more difficult when we’re removed. A single person can go mad and a couple can “nurture” each other’s madness, a family creating its own reality. Such horrible potential knows almost no borders, existing seemingly wherever people are. That’s apparently what occurred with Benjamin and Kristi Strack, a Utah couple that was unwell before things got even worse. From the AP report:

SPRINGVILLE, Utah (AP) — A Utah couple and their three children who were found dead in their home last fall overdosed on drugs after the parents told friends and family they were worried about the apocalypse, authorities said Tuesday. 

Police also found old letters written by the mother to a Utah inmate serving time for killing family members in the name of God, slayings chronicled in the 2003 Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven.

Benjamin and Kristi Strack and three of their four children — ages 11, 12 and 14 — were found dead in September in a locked bedroom of their Springville home. All five were tucked into covers in and around their parents’ bed.

At a news conference Tuesday, Springville Police Chief J. Scott Finlayson said investigators have concluded their probe and determined the family members died from drug toxicity from either methadone, heroin or a combination of drugs, including those found in cold medicine.

Authorities determined the parents committed suicide. The younger two children’s deaths were ruled homicides, although Finlayson said there were no signs of a struggle.

The manner of death for the 14-year-old, Benson Strack, was undetermined.

Police said Benson wrote a goodbye letter, leaving some of his belongings to his best friend. The only other recent writing the family left behind was a notebook containing handwritten to-do lists about feeding the pets and other chores.

Finlayson said interviews with people who knew the Stracks indicated the parents were worried about evil in the world and wanted to escape from “impending doom.”

“There seemed to be a concern about a pending apocalypse that the parents bought into,” Finlayson said. “While some friends though that suicide may have been, or could have been, included in their plans, others believed they were going to move somewhere and live off the grid.”•

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Old Print Articles: Woody Guthrie In New York, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1942/43)

January 28, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Dustbowl was central to his life and work, but Woody Guthrie had some dalliances with the un-Oklahoma of New York City beginning in 1940, which resulted in the two articles below published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The first looks at Guthrie’s involvement in It’s All Yours, an anti-Fascist, anti-Hitler musical drama performed in 1942 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was co-directed by singer-songwriter Earl Robinson as the piece says, but what goes unmentioned is that the other director was Nicholas Ray, who would begin his big-time Hollywood career a half-dozen years later. In the second article, Guthrie brings his dirty boots to the home of etiquette expert (and erstwhile Staten Island Advance reporter) Amy Vanderbilt.

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From October 5, 1942:

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From April 5, 1943:

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 27, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“It was printed on a Dot Matrix Printer.”

Original Screenplay, Culture Shock – $500,000 (Downtown)

The year was 1993, I was a film student in Arizona. The first act of this screenplay was written for a screenwriting class. That summer I devoted a month of my life to finish this project, then sent it to the Library of Congress, for a copyright. The screenplay was then put away and all but forgot about it, until recently when I was digging through my storage locker. So there you have it, I am currently in possession of a Original Screenplay, I wrote myself.

I do not have, or ever have had an agent, so therefore the asking price of $500,000 is negotiable. Currently, I reside in Oregon, so if you decide to purchase this, you will have to make your own arrangements to pick it up.

I realize that trying to sell a screenplay this way is a billion to one shot, but then again, that beats a billion to none shot.

Serious inquiries only. For more information about the screenplay or what it is about, please feel free to contact me.

Please Note: With this screenplay being over 20 years old, it was printed on a Dot Matrix Printer. If you wish I will retype the screenplay, with the purchase price.

“What A Difference A Decade Makes”

January 27, 2015 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

And what a difference twenty years has made in the proliferation and development of mobile phones, from the time of this 1995 British TV report about the robustness of the nascent market till now. The most prescient statement in the video comes from telecommunication analyst Doug Hawkins: “I think one of the big areas of growth is going to be in handling information. We all need information, whether it’s just taking a decision about buying a washing machine or what hotel to stay in if we happen to be traveling. I think those sorts of services are going to become very easy via our telephone lines.”

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“They Therefore Threaten To Replace The Humans Who Once Made The Day-To-Day Decisions”

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

The dream of the automated workplace, shared by 1930s European Fascists and technologists in postwar America, is not only aimed at blue collars but white ones also, the secretaries under siege but bosses as well. In hs Aeon essay, “RoboCorp,” Daniel C. Morris makes digestible the complexities of cryptocurrency and DACs (Distributed Autonomous Corporations) while trying to work through the pros and cons of such an arrangement. An excerpt:

“…the true economic significance of automated systems and robotics remains troublingly unclear. While they make our daily lives easier by increasing the productive efficiency of each input unit of human labour, they displace jobs; automated factories need far fewer workers. John Maynard Keynes saw this coming 85 years ago, when he coined the term ‘technological unemployment’.

Technologists (and many economists) argue that workers who lose their simple or repetitive jobs to machines are thereby set free to perform more complicated tasks. One former factory worker might supervise his robot replacement, another might design them, and still others move into entirely new sectors of the economy. Until 2008, that logic seemed to largely hold true – automation increased efficiency without dramatically reducing employment.

But automated logistics and financial systems aren’t just putting rivets into holes. These robots, whether DACs or more centralised systems, are now able to move money around an economy programmatically. They therefore threaten to replace the humans who once made the day-to-day decisions required to run businesses and organisations. Would that be so bad? The machines have already come for the manual and clerical workers; perhaps there’s a certain kind of grim satisfaction in watching them close in on the executive class, too. And yet it would be hasty to predict a broadly egalitarian outcome. The US economist Paul Krugman sees the broader risk: that we will end up ‘a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.’•

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“Do Not Permit Burial Of The Dead Until Some Certain Indication Of Death Is Apparent”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From the 1902 World Almanac and Encyclopedia, the best methods to tell if someone has died:

Tests of Death: Hold mirror to mouth. If living, moisture will gather. Push pin into flesh. If dead the hole will remain. If alive it will close up. Place fingers in front of a strong light. If alive, they will appear red; if dead, black or dark. If a person is dead decomposition is almost sure to set in after 72 hours have elapsed. If it does not, then there is room for investigation by the physician. Do not permit burial of the dead until some certain indication of death is apparent.•

“India Is Going To Need On Order Of A New Chicago Every Single Year For The Fifteen Years”

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

Gurgaon in India is a libertarian wet dream, a high-tech private city that grew from nothing, knows little or no regulation and has no infrastructure. You want your sewage taken away? Hire a firm to do it. You want to start a business? Don’t worry about pesky rules. You want roads to drive on? Not so much. You’re worried about environmental protection? Wait, what? It’s the free market extrapolated to an extreme.

On the latest EconTalk episode, Russ Roberts and fellow economist Alex Tabarrok have a lively discussion about this private city and other ones which favor “voluntary action.” While the guest is enthusiastic about Gurgaon as something of a model for the next global cities, he acknowledges its faults (“The roads situation is terrible, a disaster”), though he often waves these shortcomings away by saying they’re no worse than in other parts of India. The idea of using some sort of Disneyland approach to building private cities on a large scale, which Tabarrok seriously suggests, seems a little cuckoo to me. An excerpt:

Alex Tabarrok:

Between just 2015 and 2030, in India, the urban population is expected to increase by over a quarter of a billion people. So, just think about that. What that means is that during the next 15 years, even taking into account the reduced infrastructure in India, India is going to need on the order of a new Chicago every single year for the next 15 years. At least. And then continuing on into the future. So we have, around the world, massive increases in the urban population. And most of this is happening in the developing world. And the developing world, of course, is struggling with corruption and with poor governments and with a lack of information. And you know, we just can’t expect governments to work very well in these countries. So how are we going to plan? We can hope, right, that cities will be planned and laid out and the sewage lines will be planned for the future and everything will be divided neatly. You know, the way an urban planner in theory would do it. But that’s just not realistic. So, what can we expect? Are there other ways of doing this? And Gurgaon is one possible alternative route, which involves, you know, leaving a whole lot to the private sector.

Russ Roberts:

When you talk about that increasing urbanization, say, in India, the most likely way that’s going to happen is that the existing cities in India are going to get larger. And they are going to have increasing stress on their current infrastructure systems, which are not very effective, from what I understand, already. And so, the likely result of this urbanization and population growth is going to be muddling through with a big set of imperfections. It seems to me China is taking a different approach. China is saying: We need a bunch of new cities. So they are just building them. They are building cities out in the middle of relatively nowhere, from scratch. With lots of buildings, lots of infrastructure, from the top down. And I did read today–I didn’t get to click through on the tweet, but somebody tweeted that the Chinese, some Chinese officials were bidding in auctions to keep land prices high in some of the cities that they are worried about. This is not likely to be a successful strategy for creating value. But China has taken a different approach. It might be a lot better.

Alex Tabarrok:

So, current urban areas are certainly going to grow. But there’s also no question that we’re going to need entirely new cities–both in India and China and elsewhere. And you just look at the United States. Even in the United States, which has long been majority-urbanized, we’ve seen growth, really essentially new cities. Like Houston, has grown in the past 50 years from 100,000 to, you know, several million people. And so forth. You think about the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain: the creation of new cities like Birmingham and so forth. It’s not just London getting bigger, in other words. Although that happened as well. So, I want to put China aside for a minute, and maybe come back and talk about that. But I want to keep on, on Gurgaon, for a little bit longer, because I want to talk about what has worked, and what hasn’t.

Russ Roberts:

Yeah, go ahead.

Alex Tabarrok:

So, fire prevention in Gurgaon works really well. So, what has happened is these private developers buy a chunk of land. And within that chunk of land you have excellent infrastructure; you have excellent delivery of services. So, the developers will build office parks. And within the office parks, you have sewage. But the sewage doesn’t go anywhere. It just–once it leaves the office park–well, sometimes it will go to a small treatment plant. You’ll also have electricity–electricity 24 hours, but funded with diesel, provided with diesel. Which is inefficient. You don’t get all the economies of scale. You do get excellent fire protection. It’s pretty interesting: Gurgaon has India’s only private fire department. And it’s the only fire department really in all of India which has equipment which can reach the top of these skyscrapers.

Russ Roberts:

Good idea.

Alex Tabarrok:

Yeah, exactly. The public system is a complete disaster. You also have delivery of transportation. So, these private firms hire taxis, sort of like Uber but a totally private system to bring their workers, ferry their workers, all over the city.

Russ Roberts:

Yeah. By the way, it’s important to mention: we’ve had some discussions of private busses here, in Chile with Mike Munger. But of course many firms in Silicon Valley outside of San Francisco bus workers into their companies and have major, significant private bus companies.

Alex Tabarrok:

Exactly. It’s very similar.

Russ Roberts:

They are running them themselves. I don’t think they are hiring them out. But they are not public.

Alex Tabarrok:

Exactly. It’s very similar to that.•

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