Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

November 24, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Looking for bones and taxidermy (Trenton)

So I’m into alternative art. I collect bones and skulls, and also taxidermy in decent condition. If you have bones you want to get rid of or sell, I’ll take them. I will not accept food item bones, in example chicken, turkey, etc. Cows and pigs bones I will take if not cut up or clearly from a cooked meal. I will also take bones that are not cleaned off as I have the means to process and clean them myself, but any bones with meat remaining will need to be double bagged for sanitary reasons. All items will need to be photographed before any arrangement is made. I’m not loaded, so don’t think you can try to get $100 for a pig skull. I am willing to pay around 10-20 per skull, varying by species and condition. I WILL NOT ACCEPT BONES FROM ANIMALS THAT WERE KILLED FOR THE PURPOSE OF HARVESTING THEIR BONES TO SELL. I am open to dealing with hunters and butchers trying to dispose of their skeletal waste items, I love pig, cow and deer bones and skulls. Roadkill is fine, but I will take dirty bones, not rotting corpses. All bones taken from nature must be double bagged for sanitary reasons.

“Siri Isn’t Very Flexible And Still Makes Lots Of Mistakes…But Siri Is Embryonic”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Laptop computers were just a fad–a disappointment–and they were going away. Except they didn’t, they thrived, until even smaller, more-powerful screens began to supplant them. AI has likewise often failed to live up to its billing, a dream deferred, although now it might be starting to come true, as even Weak AI has proved powerful. From Jason Dorrier at the Singularity Hub:

“[Singularity University’s Neil] Jacobstein said Watson and programs like it don’t demonstrate intelligence that is ‘broad, deep, and subtle’ like human intelligence, but they are a multi-billion dollar fulcrum to augment a human brain faced with zettabytes of data.

Our brains, beautiful and capable as they are, have major limitations that machines simply don’t share—speed, memory, bandwidth, and biases. ‘The human brain hasn’t had a major upgrade in over 50,000 years,’ Jacobstein said.

Now, we’re a few steps away from having computer assistants that communicate like we do on the surface—speaking and understanding plain english—even as they manage, sift, and analyze huge chunks of data in the background.

Siri isn’t very flexible and still makes lots of mistakes, often humorous ones—but Siri is embryonic. Jacobstein thinks we’ll see much more advanced versions soon. In fact, with $10 million in funding, SIRI’s inventors are already working on a sequel.

And increasingly, we’re turning to the brain for inspiration.”

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“Autonomous Cars Will Also Have A Number Of Nonlinear Effects”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ridesharing will have a more profound effect on the economy in the near future than driverless cars simply because the former is doable (and being done) right now, though at some point the two will likely merge. That will cause residual effects beyond fewer crashes. From Michael Walker at the Hollywood Reporter:

“Mark Platshon, managing director of Icebreaker Ventures and a consultant to BMW’s iDivision, which manufactures electric and plug-in hybrid cars, has ridden in the Google driverless cars. ‘They can merge onto rush hour traffic on the 101 and go through a construction site,’ Platshon told the Hollywood Reporter. ‘It’s very doable.’

Autonomous cars will also have a number of nonlinear effects with impacts on categories as diverse as affordable housing and healthcare, Platshon said. ‘If we get autonomous cars, we don’t have 33,000 fatalities, 2,500,000 ER visits and $18 billion per year in costs. Take that burden off of every hospital and you’ve fixed the health care problem.’

Platshon cited the example of an acquaintance in San Francisco who had decided to not buy a car, use Uber for transportation and convert his garage to a student apartment. There are tens of thousands of garages in the U.S. that could be converted to affordable housing if people relied on car services like Uber or, in the future, autonomous vehicles that could be summoned by smart phone, Platshon said. ‘American drivers pay $200 billion a year for car insurance. We could give back $1,000 per person as discretionary spending.”

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“Cardin Has Been Known To Go On Work Binges, Wearing The Same Suit And Tie For Several Days”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The space-age period of Pierre Cardin the 1960s and early 1970s was one of the greatest bursts of creativity anyone has ever enjoyed. It still seems to me a step ahead of anything Hollywood wardrobe departments are doing today. In 1976, when he was 54 years old and the master of not a fashion house but an empire, the designer was profiled in People by Pamela Andriotakis. The opening:

“‘In the beginning, they always criticize me,’ Pierre Cardin says gleefully. ‘They say, ‘What is he doing now? Quel horreur? Quel décadence. That’s the end of Cardin.’ Then, six months later, they’re all doing it.’

The 54-year-old Frenchman is more right than humble. Not only did his flamboyant men’s clothes lead to the ‘Peacock Revolution’ of the 1960s and his ready-to-wear designer fashions for women lower the brows of haute couture, he also has inspired many of his fellow couturiers to venture into entrepreneurial areas far removed from clothing.

Few, however, have extended themselves as much as Cardin, whose $100-million-a-year operation is responsible for, among other things, Cardin towels, Cardin stereo sets, Cardin kitchens, Cardin glassware, Cardin bicycles, Cardin carpets, Cardin lamps, Cardin ashtrays, Cardin wallpaper, Cardin wines and Cardin chocolates.

‘The next thing you know he’ll be designing cheese,’ huffed an executive at archcompetitor Yves St. Laurent. ‘Cardin is no longer a label,’ exults Cardin himself. ‘It is a trademark.’

The trademark is used by 280 factories with 60,000 employees, located in 51 countries on six continents. Only Antarctica has thus far escaped the impact of what the French have come to call Cardinization. (And no one is betting against the likelihood of a Cardin penguin leash.)

While most of the Cardin products are manufactured under licensing arrangements, Cardin is more than just the man behind the scene. He is all over the scene. On a typical day he leaves his Paris townhouse after breakfast—assuming he remembers to have breakfast—and walks to his office at 59 Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, the Right Bank street of exclusive shops. There are morning meetings with directors of his foreign companies, followed by briefer consultations with textile makers and other suppliers, many of whom fly to Paris from all over Europe just to aim a 15-minute sales pitch at Cardin.

Between appointments, Cardin may lope upstairs to his fashion workroom to tinker with a detail on a garment from a forthcoming line. Cardin claims responsibility for all original designs, which are then executed by subordinates under his watchful eye. Cardin has also maintained his presence at formal showings—the latest one, his spring-summer line, was unleashed four months ago in Paris—even though his ready-to-wear business is the most profitable sector of his empire. ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘we lose money on haute couture. But it is a great laboratory for ideas.’

In the sparsely furnished, white-walled workroom, he gives brief audiences to employees with questions or suggestions, talking little but gesturing with Mediterranean expansiveness. When a supervisor approached him to pass on an employee’s request for a raise, Cardin said crisply, ‘Give it to him. He has worked for me for many years.” Another employee says, ‘You have to have a sixth sense to work for him. It is very tiring. But he is the best school in the world.’

After perhaps 15 meetings, it is time for lunch, which he often eats on a plane bound for the South of France, England or Italy en route to visiting a factory. He may be back in his offices by late afternoon, checking stocks in his three nearby boutiques, going over the books, rearranging furniture or even, with a kind of frenetic energy, sweeping up a messy room.

In especially busy times Cardin has been known to go on work binges, wearing the same suit and tie for several days, neglecting to shave and generally becoming a less than persuasive advertisement for the Cardin look. When less pressed, Cardin often spends the evening at his version of Xanadu, l’Espace (‘Space’), a combination theater and exhibition hall which he opened in December 1970. 

Cardin recently turned l’Espace into a Sarah Bernhardt museum. He has also used it to introduce new painters, sculptors and playwrights as well as to present such established performers as Ella Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich and Dionne Warwicke. He is said to lose $300,000 a year on I’Espace but is more than compensated in personal enjoyment—not to mention good public relations. The couturier André Courrèges, who admires the way Cardin operates, says, ‘He does it because it is his mistress.'”

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A Brief Note From 1910 About Lucky Chicks

November 23, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 21, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Long Beach, Cal. — Three little chicks belonging to W.B. McCracken, yesterday picked their way into the world after an unusual experience. For thirteen days the mother hen had been busily attending to her sitting duties when a hungry snake drove her from the nest and gorged itself with three eggs.

The snake lingered about the premises and McCracken shot it. Wondering at its odd proportions, he performed an operation and found the eggs. They were placed back under the hen and at the end of the regulation time were hatched.”

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“Money And People Are Leaving The Country”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Vladimir Putin is a twentieth-century figure trapped in the wrong age, a man out of time, seemingly making shit up as he goes along, and now he’s really stepped in it, though because of his absolute rule there have been thus far no consequences for him, just for the country. From the Economist:

“MALINA, a trendy restaurant in a city south of Moscow, was empty on a recent Thursday evening. ‘A crisis,” the manager explained nervously. Some meat and fish dishes were missing. ‘Sanctions,’ he added with a sigh. The signs of a country in the economic doldrums are visible in Moscow, too. Tour operators are going out of business; shops and small businesses are up for sale; LED displays outside bureaux de change send spirits sinking.

Russia’s economy is teetering on the verge of recession. The central bank says it expects the next two years to bring no growth. Inflation is on the rise. The rouble has lost 30% of its value since the start of the year, and with it the faith of the country’s businessmen. Banks have been cut off from Western capital markets, and the price of oil—Russia’s most important export commodity—has fallen hard. Consumption, the main driver of growth in the previous decade, is slumping. Money and people are leaving the country.

This is not the mid-1980s, when a collapse in the oil price paved the way for perestroika and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor is it 1998, when the country defaulted on its debts. While the overall mood is clearly depressed, it is a long way from panic. Russia’s total foreign debt is just 35% of GDP; it has a private sector which can be surprisingly agile and adaptable and is contributing some growth by substituting things made at home for imported goods; most importantly, it has a floating exchange rate that mitigates some of the oil-price shock.

But the oil-backed consumption-led economy which has provided nearly 15 years of growth (it took a stumble in 2008-09, during the global financial crisis) has hit the buffers.”

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“We Barely Even Know What The Human Brain Does”

November 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Wall Street Journal interview conducted by Gillian Wong, Andrew Ng, formerly of Google and now the head of AI research for Baidu, tries to cool down the hype of two hot tech sectors, driverless cars and deep learning. An excerpt:

WSJ:

What about the self-driving car project? We know Baidu has partnered with BMW on that.

Andrew Ng:

That’s another research exploration. Building self-driving cars is really hard. I think making it achieve high levels of safety is challenging. It’s a relatively early project. Building something that is safe enough to drive hundreds of thousands of miles, including roads that you haven’t seen before, roads that you don’t have a map of, roads where someone might have started to do construction just 10 minutes ago, that is hard. …

WSJ:

Who’s at the forefront of deep learning?

Andrew Ng:

There are a lot of deep-learning startups. Unfortunately, deep learning is so hot today that there are startups that call themselves deep learning using a somewhat generous interpretation. It’s creating tons of value for users and for companies, but there’s also a lot of hype. We tend to say deep learning is loosely a simulation of the brain. That sound bite is so easy for all of us to use that it sometimes causes people to over-extrapolate to what deep learning is. The reality is it’s really very different than the brain. We barely (even) know what the human brain does.•

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10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

November 23, 2014 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • Pat Robertson: God Is Totally Cool With Speeding
  • That Time Jerry Lewis Sang ‘Happy Birthday’ To His Erect Penis
  • Man Discovers His Headaches Were Caused By A Worm Living In His Brain
  • Everyone Poops. Even Santa.
  • WATCH: German Radio Hosts Get Boobs For A Day
  • ‘Do I Look Like A Slut?’
  • Men And Their Sex Dolls Exposed In New Photo Series (NSFW)
  • Man Dismembered Dad, Used Boxed Body Parts As TV Stand
  • This Man Says He Is A Platypus
  • ‘Today’ Hosts Undergo Testicular Exam On Live TV

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

November 23, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

 

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

  1. mike tyson spofford juvenile facility
  2. bob guccione interviewing alvin toffler
  3. shooting buffalo from a moving train
  4. jascha heifetz electric car
  5. is there more forest today than in the past?
  6. ross perot electronic town hall 1969
  7. cyberwar p.w. singer
  8. 1977 new yorker article about personal computers
  9. movie about jesus freaks
  10. story about an old time medicine man

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

November 22, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, it became which dessert won't be popular this Thanksgiving.

This week, it became clear which dessert won’t be popular this Thanksgiving.

  • Steve Ballmer is going to profit hugely from corporate welfare.
  • Robotics will reinvent the security industry.
  • AC Grayling points out that we’re already sort of Transhumanist.
  • A brief note from 1910 about a winner.

“I’m Absolutely Baffled At The Suggestion That The World Will Stand Up And Take Notice…Because We Successfully Built A Long Metal Pipe”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peggy Noonan, who will tell you how to be an American, you stupid, loves reading the tea leaves or some such bullshit, explaining how the nation feels, based on her own ideology and false narratives. Her latest WSJ opinion piece is a real spectacle, calling for making boys into men by teaching them how to toxify the country, a place which is home, after all, to the skeleton of Ronald Reagan. Having a federal job program for unemployed people that builds or rebuilds infrastructure would be great, humanistically and economically, but it needn’t shouldn’t revolve around a certain pipeline. From Simon Malloy at Salon:

“Noonan also shared her thoughts on the Keystone XL pipeline, which … well, here, just read it:

And there is the Keystone XL pipeline and the administration’s apparent intent to veto a bill that allows it. There the issue is not only the jobs the pipeline would create, and not only the infrastructure element. It is something more. If it is done right, the people who build the pipeline could be pressed to take on young men—skill-less, aimless—and get them learning, as part of a crew, how things are built and what it is to be a man who builds them.

On top of that, the building of the pipeline would show the world that America is capable of coming back, that we’re not only aware of our good fortune and engineering genius, we are pushing it hard into the future. America’s got her hard-hat on again. America is dynamic. ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.; Not just this endless talk of limits, restrictions, fears and ‘Oh, we’re all going to melt in the warm global future!’

I am completely at a loss for why Keystone XL, among the many construction jobs available to young men (but not women, apparently), would be uniquely capable of transforming ‘skill-less, aimless’ young men into real American manly men of manly valor. Apparently the pipeline will carry not just horribly toxic tar-sands oil, but also good old-fashioned American gumption (imported from Canada).

And I’m absolutely baffled at the suggestion that the world will stand up and take notice of American engineering and dynamism because we successfully built a long metal pipe.”

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“The Right Has Compared Obama To A Monarch”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I’m really going to enjoy the Buckwild Obama of the last two years of his Administration. The President has always been playing the long game, and though some announced his Presidency as “over” even before the Democratic losses in the recent mid-terms, he’s continued moving forward with his policies and now really has no reason to listen to the shouting people on the TV box. With immigration reform, he’s also put his opponents on their heels. From Noam Schrieber at The New Republic:

“Intellectually, of course, conservatives understand the importance of sticking to procedural objections even here. They can read polls as well as the rest of us. And the polls say that while Americans overwhelmingly favor the substance of Obama’s preferred immigration reforms, they also oppose enacting the reform by way of executive fiat.

No surprise then that the conservative message machine has gone on at length about the ‘constitutional crisis’ the president is instigating. The right has compared Obama to a monarch (see here and here), a Latin American caudillo, even a conspirator against the Roman Republic. (Ever melodrama much?) The rhetoric gets a little thick. But if you boil it down, the critique is mostly about Obama’s usurpation of power and contempt for democratic norms, not the substance of his policy change. Some Republicans no doubt believe it. 

And yet, try as they might to stick to the script, there’s something about dark-skinned foreigners that sends the conservative id into overdrive. Most famously, there’s Iowa Congressman Steve King’s observation last year that for every child brought into the country illegally ‘who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.’

While King tends to be especially vivid in his lunacy, he’s no outlier.”

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“Everyone Goes To The Airport, Everyone Has Trouble Parking”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Here’s a new twist in the Peer Economy I don’t think will work, especially as ridesharing becomes more popular: You don’t have to pay for parking at the airport (and you’ll receive other amenities) if you allow your car to be rented while you’re out of town. From Lori Aratani at the Washington Post:

“A San Francisco-based company is putting yet another spin on the Washington area’s sharing economy, giving travelers flying out of Dulles International Airport free parking and a car wash in exchange for permission to rent their cars to other drivers.

FlightCar launches Wednesday at Dulles and two other U.S. airports. Participating travelers can drop off their cars at a designated lot near Dulles. In exchange for letting FlightCar offer a vehicle for rent, the travelers receive free parking, a Town Car ride to the airport, a car wash and per-mile payment if the vehicle is rented — to a pre-screened driver — while they’re away.

‘Everyone goes to the airport, everyone has trouble parking, so it just make sense,’ said Kevin Petrovic, president and co-founder of FlightCar.”

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“Automation’s New Wave Is Hitting Just About Everyone”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love reading Nicholas Carr, so bright he is and such a blessedly lucid writer, though I don’t always find myself agreeing with him. I won’t blame him for the headline of his latest WSJ piece, “Automation Makes Us Dumb,” but I do take issue with his idea that we should be alarmed that AI is causing “skill fade” in airline pilots, making it dangerous to fly. It’s no less scary for a plane to crash by human hand rather than because of a computer failure (or because of some combined failure of the two). It’s bad regardless. But accidents on domestic airlines in America have become almost non-existent as the crafts have become more computerized and we’ve learned to navigate wind shears. That wouldn’t be the case without machines aiding planes, which are, you know, machines. I think Carr’s enthusiasm for “adaptive automation” makes sense, at least in the short and medium terms, though ultimately I favor whatever most often prevents plane noses from touching earth. From Carr:

“In the 1950s, a Harvard Business School professor named James Bright went into the field to study automation’s actual effects on a variety of industries, from heavy manufacturing to oil refining to bread baking. Factory conditions, he discovered, were anything but uplifting. More often than not, the new machines were leaving workers with drabber, less demanding jobs. An automated milling machine, for example, didn’t transform the metalworker into a more creative artisan; it turned him into a pusher of buttons.

Bright concluded that the overriding effect of automation was (in the jargon of labor economists) to ‘de-skill’ workers rather than to ‘up-skill’ them. ‘The lesson should be increasingly clear,’ he wrote in 1966. ‘Highly complex equipment’ did not require ‘skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be built into the machine.’

We are learning that lesson again today on a much broader scale. As software has become capable of analysis and decision-making, automation has leapt out of the factory and into the white-collar world. Computers are taking over the kinds of knowledge work long considered the preserve of well-educated, well-trained professionals: Pilots rely on computers to fly planes; doctors consult them in diagnosing ailments; architects use them to design buildings. Automation’s new wave is hitting just about everyone.”

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“Passengers Of The Future May Well View Vehicles As Just Another Form Of Public Transportation”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The idea that we have passed peak-car in America has been circling the block for a few years, that we would simply purchase miles the way we do minutes. While the Sharing Economy is part of the shift, the transformation won’t be complete until autonomous vehicles are perfected, and the final five-to-ten percent of that process isn’t easy. From Jerry Hirsch at the Los Angeles Times:

“Personal transportation is on the cusp of its greatest transformation since the advent of the internal combustion engine.

With the rise of self-driving vehicles, ride-sharing, traffic congestion and environmental regulation, we may not even own cars in the future, much less drive them.

A glimpse of the coming revolution can be seen in the models debuting this week at the Los Angeles Auto Show. Hidden under their hoods and dashboards are sensors that take the first steps toward autonomous driving. Already, cars can park themselves, slam on the brakes to avoid crashes and adjust steering to stay centered in a lane.

But the disruption will go well beyond who is — or isn’t — at the controls. For a century, cars have been symbols of freedom and status. Passengers of the future may well view vehicles as just another form of public transportation, to be purchased by the trip or in a subscription. Buying sexy, fast cars for garages could evolve into buying seat-miles in appliance-like pods, piloted by robots, parked in public stalls.”

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Old Print Article: “Plans Airports Within Cities,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

November 20, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It sounds odd, but it seemed to some in the Roaring Twenties that the best way to get to the airport was by plane. In an article in the February 19, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an engineer predicted that soon city dwellers would be able order up small planes that could take off from or land on midtown buildings which had been retrofitted as small airports, saving themselves from the veritable tortoise-like transport of trains and taxis.

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“Few Punks Got The Connection”

November 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The first two paragraphs from Bee Wilson’s London Review of Books piece about the new autobiography by Vivienne Westwood, the designer who made punk a big thing but lost interest when she realized her tattered tees were a fashion statement but not a political one:

“Some time in 1979, after the death of Sid Vicious and before the enthronement of Margaret Thatcher, Vivienne Westwood ‘lost interest’ in punk. She and her lover Malcolm McLaren had been at the heart of the British version: they had dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom they got to know thanks to SEX, the clothes shop they (McLaren and Westwood) ran on the King’s Road. There is fierce disagreement as to whether Westwood or John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, thought up the title ‘Anarchy in the UK’ – he says it was him; she says it was her – but there is no doubt that she had a powerful influence on the way punks, including Lydon, dressed. She was the first to design T-shirts covered in punk ‘bricolage’, ranging from studs and chains to chicken bones to nipple zips, and she was the one who put a safety pin through the queen’s mouth on a T-shirt. By 1977, teenagers all over the country were copying the look she had started: the spiky hair, the studs, the clothes daubed with antisocial messages. It wasn’t what Westwood had wanted, though. She was hoping for revolution. ‘When I turned round, on the barricades,’ she says in Vivienne Westwood, an autobiography written with Ian Kelly (rather than the usual ghostwritten celebrity tosh), ‘there was no one there. That was how it felt. They were just still pogoing. So I lost interest.’

The prevailing impression of Westwood that we get from the book is of a leader whose people have been a constant disappointment to her. ‘The way I thought about ‘punk’ politics,’ Westwood says now, ‘was this: at the time, we were just becoming aware of these terrible politicians torturing people – I’m thinking of Pinochet, for instance … The idea was that kids would try to put a spoke in the wheel of this terrible killing machine.’ She saw herself as someone who would ‘confront the rotten status quo through the way I dressed and dressed others’. But it turned out that the kids were mainly interested in buying the new rubber skirts and bondage gear from her shop and playing punk rock records. Whoever deserves the credit for the title ‘Anarchy in the UK,’ the people listening to the music were not taking the message seriously enough. Few punks got the connection – so obvious to Westwood – between wearing a distressed top featuring a swastika, the word DESTROY and defeating Pinochet. Westwood believed her clothes – which she saw and still sees as her art – were inexorably leading punks towards radical politics. When you put on a punk garment such as a real dog collar, Westwood says, ‘basically you are insulting yourself, but you’re also clearing yourself of all egotism.’ But when she turned round, they were just spitting and jumping. So she moved on.”

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“Asuna Would Make A Good Date”

November 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Apart from yikes!, I’m sort of out of words when it comes to Asuna, the tween robot created by Japanese inventor Hiroshi Ishiguro, which tries to exit the uncanny valley at the far end. Currently controlled remotely, an autonomous version is, of course, in the works. From Maria Khan at IBT:

“Life-like robots are taking Japan by storm and will soon be seen as actresses and even used as clones of the deceased.

‘Earlier this month, Robotics Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro showcased his latest creation, Android ‘Asuna’ at the Tokyo Designers’ Week.

Dubbed a ‘geminoid’, Asuna was well-liked by the visitors at the show, who said the robot was very human-like and had a nice voice.

‘[Asuna] would make a good date; a cheap date!’ said one man.

Most of the visitors remarked ‘sukoi’ meaning ‘amazing’ upon seeing Asuna, due to her human-like skin and facial expressions.

Some visitors, assuming Asuna was just another human, respectfully bowed before her requesting a selfie with her.“

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“This Could Be A Tax Gift That Keeps On Giving”

November 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Income inequality may not end up being the primary economic challenge of these automated times, but it certainly is a glaring symptom of a lot of problems. From Suzanne McGee at the Guardian:

“Which would you think would be larger for Ford Motor, a company that last year reported revenues of $139.4b: the taxes it pays the US federal government or the compensation it pays its CEO?

If you picked option B, congratulations – you may be cynical, but you’re right. Alan Mulally, Ford’s CEO, pocketed a compensation package that totaled $23.2m while Ford itself got a US federal tax refund of $19m.

And Ford isn’t the only company to pay its CEO more than it forked over to Uncle Sam.

Seven of the country’s 30 largest corporations paid more to their CEOs than they did in taxes last year, according to a just-released study by the Center for Effective Government and the Institute for Policy Studies.

At the same time, Citigroup qualified for a $260m tax refund from the IRS, thanks to a special waiverthat enabled it to capture the full tax benefits of buying unprofitable businesses. This could be a tax gift that keeps on giving, as the bank has been on a tear to keep earning more to take full advantage of the provision.

The rift between tax burden and executive pay for big companies is ‘getting worse,’ says Scott Klinger, director of revenue and spending policies at the Center for Effective Government.”

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“Nobody Knows Who Is Behind The Masks Worn By The Others”

November 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

A strong central government is often made out to be the enemy in America, but I doubt Mexicans would agree. Our neighboring nation isn’t all bad news–there are some positive economic signs–but an illicit and decrepit system of governance, oftentimes merely a marriage of politicians on the make and men with guns, has allowed for horrors. From Marian Blasberg and Jens Glüsing’s Spiegel article about the disappeared 43 student teachers who were likely killed by gangsters on the orders of a local mayor:

“After more than an hour, they reach a remote village where a roadblock brings the convoy to a halt. A dozen armed men approach and indicate that they should get out of their vehicles.

[Civilian militia leader Cristóforo] García turns off the engine and he and his group suddenly find themselves standing at an intersection surrounded by men with a distrustful look in their eyes. And once again, nobody knows who is behind the masks worn by the others.

“What do you want here?” demands an older man in a sombrero who appears to be their leader.

García explains that they are looking for the disappeared students but the man doesn’t believe him. Just a few minutes ago, the man says, a military convoy rolled through the village and points to a helicopter circling overhead. It looks as though they are carrying out an operation nearby. Perhaps they are once again looking for mass graves.

‘What do you have to do with them?’ the leader demands.

‘With this government?’ García asks. ‘Nothing. We don’t have a government. Do you?’ 

The man in the sombrero shakes his head. His village is called Tianquizolco and is home to a couple hundred indigenous farmers. As in other villages in Guerrero, they have founded their own police force. Someone has to protect us, the man in the sombrero says, adding that people disappear from here all too often as well.

Then, suddenly, the situation changes. The distrust between the two groups vanishes at the moment that the military convoy tries to pass through the village a second time. Together, the two groups block the way and stop the vehicles. The entire village is now in an uproar. The man in the sombrero demands that the military present identification, but they don’t have any documents with them.”

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“It Wasn’t Until 1904 That The Broader Public Got A Whiff Of The Curse”

November 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The American overreaction to Ebola, a real epidemic in Liberia but not here, probably has more to do with unstated anxieties than spoken ones. We’re in a globalized world now, on the cusp of a post-white country, in a time of technology and terrorism, invaders everywhere. Close the airports, strengthen the borders, quarantine the threats. 

People have always tried to place a name to their fears, even if it was the wrong one. If you go back 100 to 150 years, life was commonly brutal and brief. Famine and disease and war were seemingly everywhere and knew no solution, treatment or permanent treaty. Anarchy was fashionable, science terrifying (“What hath God wrought!“), fascism about to rise and revolution in the air. The world seemed haunted. Even the “unsinkable” Titanic drank itself to death. Could some of that era’s carnage, even the shocking capsizing of that famous British passenger liner, have occurred because we had the temerity to disrupt nature’s order and aroused a mummy’s curse? Of course not, but sometimes the sick are not very circumspect of the diagnosis. From Rose Eveleth’s Nautilus piece “The Curse of the Unlucky Mummy“:

“Sometime in the 1860s, five recent Oxford graduates took a trip to Egypt. Together they sailed down the Nile, a tourist attraction even then. To remember their trip, they bought a souvenir in the mummy pits of Deir el-Bahri—the coffin lid of a priestess of Amen-Ra. The high priests of Amen-Ra, named after an Egyptian deity, were military rulers who commanded southern Egypt in the 21st Dynasty (1085 to 945 B.C.), a time of turmoil and strife. Powerful and prone to keep secrets, the priesthood worked to appease the gods that Egypt had clearly angered. With her wide, baleful eyes, open palms, and outstretched fingers, the priestess on the coffin lid seemed to cast a malevolent allure.

On their way back from Egypt, two of the men died. A third went to Cairo and accidentally shot himself in the arm while quail hunting and had to have it amputated. Another member of the group, Arthur Wheeler, managed to make it back to England, only to lose his entire fortune gambling. He moved to America and lost his new fortune to both a flood and a fire. The coffin lid was then placed under the care of Wheeler’s sister, who attempted to have it photographed in 1887. The photographer died, as did the porter. The man asked to translate the hieroglyphs on the lid committed suicide. The coffin lid seemed almost certainly cursed. But this was only the beginning.

Today, the 5-foot-tall ‘mummy board’ lives in the British Museum, where it’s officially known as ‘artifact 22542.’ The mummified priestess that may have lain beneath it has been lost to eternity. But it has another, more commonly used name: ‘Unlucky Mummy.’ Since its arrival at the museum in 1889, the Unlucky Mummy has been blamed for everything from the sinking of the Titanic to the escalation of World War I. How this piece of wood become so intimately and persistently connected with death and destruction is a story of the endlessly swirling tales that people tell when they are afraid—of change, of politics, of science. It is the kind of story that never dies, only feeds upon itself, updating and morphing and tightening its grip no matter how much light is thrown on it.

By the time the Unlucky Mummy arrived at the British Museum, its reputation had seeped through British private society. While the museum curators generally scoffed at the alleged curse, men at soirees, dinner parties, and ‘ghost clubs,’ traded stories of its powers. But it wasn’t until 1904 that the broader public got a whiff of the curse. That was the year that a young, dashing, and ambitious journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson published a front-page article in the Daily Express, called ‘A Priestess of Death,’ about the allegedly haunted mummy. ‘It is certain that the Egyptians had powers which we in the 20th century may laugh at, yet can never understand,’ he wrote.

Three years later, Robinson died suddenly of a fever, and his friends immediately thought of the mummy’s curse. ‘The very last time I saw him he told me a wonderful tale about a mummy which had caused the death of everybody who had to do with it,’ wrote Archibald Marshall, an English author and journalist.”

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“By 2030, We Should Be Reaching Speeds Between 225 And 250 Miles An Hour, On Average”

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

In Jared Lindzon’s Impact Lab piece which predicts that the average travel speed for human transport by 2030 will be at or near 250mph (I’ll take the under), the author looks at “Re-Programming Mobility,” a report by NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy research scientist Anthony Townsend, which imagines a quartet of extreme traffic scenarios being realized in the next 15 years. An excerpt:

“In his report Townsend takes an in depth look at four possible outcomes in four specific locations, though he says that they’re meant to serve as a representation of the country as a whole. In his report he outlines concerns over government partnerships with private companies, and considers how those agreements could play out over the long haul.

The first scenario takes place in Atlanta, where a near-bankrupt municipal government of the future is unable to afford repairs to its crumbling infrastructure, so it enters a partnership with Google.

‘The idea there is that Google does get to implement its vision of driverless cars, and does so in part with the state government in Georgia,’ said Townsend. ‘You get a whole lot of land use impacts from them, hyper urban sprawl, neighborhoods that aren’t connected to this network and get left behind, and then you get a lot of difficult questions around the role of a single company having so much control over infrastructure.’

The second scenario considers a dystopian future for Los Angeles, where self-driving cars are forced to share the roads with manually driven vehicles, creating unsafe and unpredictable roadways.

‘It’s not a world where we all have these identical perfect pod cars — you have no idea what to expect from other drivers,’ he said. ‘On top of that you’re basically doubling the number of cars, because all of a sudden kids and senior citizens and visually impaired people are going to be buying cars for the first time, so it’s a world of messy transition, and the L.A. region basically becomes unlivable.’

The third scenario takes place in New Jersey, where global warming has caused a series of brutal winters and severe weather patterns, which in turn put a strain on road maintenance. Once the city exhausts its resources, it calls upon the state to help rebuild the transit system.

‘They build a network of high speed, electronically hailed busses and rapid transit,’ said Townsend. ‘So you’ve basically got busses running at 6-inches of separation through the Lincoln Tunnel to make up for the real capacity they never built.’

The fourth and final scenario imagined by Townsend and his team considers the future of transportation in Boston, where smart transit systems and electric bikes help support a city of students living in high-density single-person apartments, while sharing transit routes with freight vehicles leaving the harbor.

‘Most shipping companies can’t keep up with the volume, but you’ve also seen Amazon and Google and EBay getting into same-day delivery, so you can imagine what might happen in the extreme is that they would start forcing all the freight to be delivered at night,’ he said. ‘So the city would be for people during the daytime and robots at night.’”

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“It Prevents The Brain From Learning A City’s Geography”

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

The weather report for NYC on Google one day last week told me the temperature was “79°” when it was actually 59°. I realized the info was mistaken because of common sense, but machines don’t yet have that quality nor will they likely in the near run. While I’m sure driverless cars and crowd robotics will reduce auto accidents, the system will always have ghosts, and it’s reasonable to ask whether they will put ghosts in our “machines.” It seems a pretty safe bet that our cognition will shift when we offload driving and navigation responsibilities to algorithms, that some abilities will atrophy, even if we come out ahead in the aggregate. From Katia Moskvitch at the BBC:

“Technology wasn’t supposed to work that way. Manufacturers have supported drivers with power steering, cruise control, antilock brakes and electronic stability controls. Then they gave us sophisticated on-board computers that power car entertainment systems and fine-tune our cars’ performance on the go. Today we drive sleek, aerodynamic vehicles with more computing power than early Space Shuttles.

And yet, in many ways, it’s now the technology itself that’s getting in our way. Yes, today’s cars can help us not just to stay in line, keep to the speed limit and maintain the correct distance to the car ahead. However, there’s also a huge drawback: the more we rely on technology, the less we pay attention to what’s happening around our cars.

Lack of learning

Who, for instance, can confidently adjust all the systems of a car without getting lost in confusing menu choices? Or take something as basic as the cruise control: with our foot off the accelerator, how often do we have to make a sharp brake because we forget to disengage the cruise control?

The problem, though, runs deeper than that. A survey commissioned by in 2008 by UK newspaper The Mirror found that 1.5 million motorists have veered suddenly in traffic when following their GPS instructions without taking notice of the cars around them. And about 300,000 drivers have crashed after following instructions from their satnav.

Then there’s the problem of what happens when the tech is taken away. Drivers who use their GPS daily on regular routes are more likely to get lost on days when their electronic guide is left at home, or out of battery. That’s true even if they make this trip many times over several days, because it’s much more difficult for the brain to remember a navigation system’s step-by-by instructions; on the contrary, it prevents the brain from learning a city’s geography.”

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A Brief Note From 1910 About A Pedestrian

November 19, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 16, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Oklahoma City — George Palmer yesterday reached home after a walk of 8,500 miles. He started from here the first of last December, walked to San Francisco, thence to New York, and thence home.”

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“There’s A Lot Of Ways To Get That Exercise, Get That Reading Muscle Worked On”

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

I can’t guarantee there will always be Broadway, but I’m sure there will always be theater. I feel the same way about books, even if brick-and-mortar stores are (sadly) in a steep decline. There will permanently be a hunger for written stories. 

Of course, it takes some training to take advantage of the endless supply of volumes now available to us, and James Patterson is concerned that reading is an endangered species. He’s right to question what an Amazon monopoly on book pricing might mean, though I think the money he’s allocating to TV ads encouraging reading might be better spent on simply buying comic books for low-income families with young children. Having grown up in very modest circumstances and having learned to read on Mad magazine, I can vouch for such a plan. Based on his interview with Erin Keane of Salon, Patterson is certainly aware of the power of pleasure reading early in life. An excerpt:

“Question:

What’s the goal here? More independent bookstores, more book sales?

James Patterson:

I think the goal is just more people reading. And to do that, a lot of things have to happen. Actually, to me, the group that can do the most good here is Amazon. Amazon could actually dedicate itself to saving books and literature in this country. It really could. And that would be the easiest fix, directionally.

I think they probably think they’re doing that, but they’re not, at least not yet. Yes, they want to lower prices, and you know, theoretically that’s fine, but I don’t know how we’d do that on a practical level and keep stores… You know, in terms of evolving the system as opposed to fracturing the system, [Amazon is] in a position to do something. The government is in a position to do something. Ironically, you know, we have a very liberal president, and he doesn’t seem terribly interested in the subject, unfortunately. I know he’s got a lot on his plate already, but you know. I mean, look, all over Europe you have governments who protect the publishers and protect books.

Question:

Yeah, there was that New York Times Bookends piece recently about how France treats books as an ‘essential good,’ like food and utilities. They’re taxed at lower rates, price discounts are pretty severely controlled. Is that a model that you think would be useful?

James Patterson:

No, I don’t think it’s a model, but I think it’s something to pay attention to. I think the government could be more involved. I mean, obviously the government has stepped in when banks were in trouble and the automobile business was in trouble. I think it’s something that local, state and federal government could be doing more.

This is once again symbolic, the kind of leadership pledge, you know. We’re gonna ask people to write to the President, write to their Congress and their representatives. And have the President take a pledge that once a month, he’ll appear in public carrying a book, he’ll visit a library store, or you know, the local representative. And then to have some of these [politicans] going on record in government sessions that they’re concerned about the state of reading in our country. And they should be.

Because, look, with our kids, and that’s a big deal with me, kids are not reading as broadly as they should and as they used to. We’re getting more and more of this kind of tunnel-vision, get on your little mission to become a doctor, lawyer, mathematician, engineer, etc., and [kids] really don’t read. My son’s at a very good prep school, and they don’t read as much as I’d like them to do, in terms of breadth of reading. You know, they don’t know who a lot of the famous authors [are]. Not that they should matter who they are, but … my own thing about kids at the top [is] that in the course of high school they’re exposed to a couple hundred really good, interesting authors, you know, ranging from Toni Morison to Cormac McCarthy to Truman Capote to Saul Bellow, etc., etc., and just be familiar with different voices and ways of looking at the world. I think that’s important in terms of really good readers.

More important, maybe, is at-risk kids, because, and this is a big deal with me, I do a lot, as much as any individual can do, but at-risk kids, if they’re not… if they don’t become competent readers—I’m not talking about readers for life, I’m talking about competent readers—how are they going to get through high school? If you’re not a competent reader. And that’s an epidemic around this country, kids who cannot read at a competent level. How you gonna do history, how you gonna do science? You just can’t. I mean, you sit there and you struggle and it takes 15 minutes to read the first page. That doesn’t work. In a lot of cases, it’s correctible.

Question:

There’s research that says that kids who grow up in a household where there are books in the house are more likely to become constant readers than those who don’t. 

James Patterson:

That’s a piece of it. That’s a piece of it. What happens in the schools is a piece of it. I just gave a talk, and I was asked to talk on this subject in front of all of the middle school principals in New York City, public schools, and they asked me to talk about the principals encouraging students to read for fun, to read extra stuff, to read outside of the Common Core, to read things, because the more they read the better they get at it. It’s really simple. I’ll go into schools and I’ll go, ‘Who plays soccer?’ ‘Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ ‘You better now or three years ago?’ ‘We’re better now! Yeah!’ ‘How come?’ ‘Cause we play a lot! Yeah!’ ‘Okay, same thing, dudes.’ If you read, and you can read fun stuff, you can read comic books, you can read a lot of different… there’s a lot of ways to get that exercise, get that reading muscle worked on. If you do that, you will become good readers, and school will be easier.“

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