“I Thought The Trial Had Some Meaning For Me”

May 9, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

patty-hearst-emily-harris

The publication of a recent unauthorized biography of Joan Didion has reopened the conversation on her career, with some turning their guns on her canon, but I still vote “yes,” especially in regards to her writing about her native California. 

One assignment in the Golden State that never panned out as planned was her 1976 reportage of the Patty Hearst trial in San Francisco, which was supposed to run in Rolling Stone. Didion couldn’t find the thread of the court proceedings of the debutante terrorist but used the experience to work over some of her own knots.

A few of her recollections of this period have been published in the New York Review of Books. The essay jumps around, touching on two different coming-of-age stories which occurred, roughly speaking, in the same milieu. Really intended for Didion completists. The introduction:

I had told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone that I would cover the Patty Hearst trial, and this pushed me into examining my thoughts about California. Some of my notes from the time follow here. I never wrote the piece about the Hearst trial, but I went to San Francisco in 1976 while it was going on and tried to report it. And I got quite involved in uncovering my own mixed emotions. This didn’t lead to my writing the piece, but eventually it led to—years later—Where I Was From (2003).

When I was there for the trial, I stayed at the Mark. And from the Mark, you could look into the Hearst apartment. So I would sit in my room and imagine Patty Hearst listening to Carousel. I had read that she would sit in her room and listen to it. I thought the trial had some meaning for me—because I was from California. This didn’t turn out to be true.

—March 23, 2016•

Tags: ,

“Researchers Say They Have Visualised How LSD Alters The Way The Brain Works”

May 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

leary2 (1)

Although lysergic acid diethylamide, was, early in its discovery phase, considered a possible treatment for serious mental-health issues, it came to be seen during the ’60s, through the urging of Richard Alpert and Dr. Timothy Leary and others, as a societal powerwash of sorts, a tonic to radically remove the corrupting, conforming influences of gods and governments, a way to awaken the soporific, a means of cleansing the doors of perception. 

Revolutions are messy, however, and freakouts and flying teenagers did not stamp a smiley face on the “medicine.” It was just plain dangerous to unloose such unregulated experimentation into the world. Even Leary himself, who proselytized at campuses and correctional facilities alike, thought all along that the drug was a short-term panacea with diminishing returns, that soon something else would have to wake up the “beloved robots”–perhaps it would be computer software. Serious academic interest in the drug unsurprisingly idled.

Decades later, there are fewer flashbacks of the dosing and overdosing, and LSD is gaining currency again as a legitimate means of medical treatment. But will it ever shake off its bad reputation? And can its very real dangers be sufficiently neutralized?

From Jon Kelly at the BBC:

Mention LSD and you might think of the 1960s counterculture – kaftanned hippies in San Francisco, or the more adventurous end of the Beatles’ back catalogue, or the tragedy of Pink Floyd singer Syd Barrett losing his grip on reality.

But for the first time, researchers say they have visualised how LSD alters the way the brain works.

A team at Imperial College London says they found it broke down barriers between areas that control functions like vision, hearing and movement. The study was with a small group – 20 subjects – but theresearchers say it could lead to a revolution in the way addiction, anxiety and depression are treated.

For the past decade and a half, academics around the world have been studying whether psychedelic substances that cause hallucinations, changes in perception and mind-altering states could have medical benefits.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve been here. Back in the 1960s there were high hopes for the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, too. Four major scientific conferences were held on the subject. Thousands of papers were published.

But soon enough fears over the recreational use of LSD – or lysergic acid diethylamide, to give its full title – ensured research all but ground to a halt.•

Tags:

A Note From 1925 About A Mechanical Horse

May 8, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Bryan-1924-DemNatConv

flappersmechanicalhorse5

From the August 11, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

bryan7

Tags:

“As Technology Obliterates The Significance Of Where We Live And Work…Texas Resists”

May 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

rodeo112

When Tyler Cowen wrote his provocative 2013 Time cover story about Texas being the future of America, I pushed back a bit, wondering if the swarm of transplants to the state might change it profoundly, whether Texas as we know it–conservative, small-government, uber-capitalist–was even the future of Texas, let alone the rest of us. 

In a wonderfully written article, Manny Fernandez of the New York Times explores this tension between red and blue and old and new, with lifelong Texans making a fierce stand culturally, attempting to turn their home into something of a “superstate.” The new attitude is a blend of official and unofficial initiatives that began, not coincidentally, after the election of the first African-American President. Despite the pride and ardor, it may be a last stand in this digital, multicultural age.

An excerpt:

The idea that Texas is the last place is part of a new phenomenon. People throughout the state say they believe that their way of life is under assault and that they are making a kind of last stand by simply being Texan. It is this fear, anger and sometimes paranoia that lurks beneath the surface of Texas politics and that underlies the expansion of gun rights, the reflexive antagonism toward Washington, and the opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues that seems essential for succeeding in state politics these days. Senator Ted Cruz’s remarks dismissing New York values at a Republican debate should come as no surprise. That’s how people from the last best place talk about other places.

But Texas is not under attack. It is merely changing as America changes with it. It is a majority-minority state that has become increasingly diverse and nonwhite — rural Texas is shrinking while urban and suburban Texas is expanding — and the tension between what Texas is and what it was has come to define the state.

The hard-right domination of Texas politics frustrates the state’s Democrats and plenty of others in Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. They are agitated, but they stay put because they view Texas as forever, and Republican Texas as a kind of temporary occupation. It’s hard to know if they’re right, but easy to see why people’s emotional investment in Texas transcends conservative politics.

…

As the world grows smaller, as technology obliterates the significance of where we live and work, as Americans become more transient, Texas resists. It declares, to itself and the nation: Place matters. America needs a superstate, or to put it another way, an antistate. Sometimes we love it here and sometimes we are disgusted here, but, to twist Gertrude Stein’s line about Oakland, Calif., there is a here here. We tattoo Texas on our arms, buy Texas-built trucks and climb fire escapes with Texas dirt in our pockets. Place, we are unsubtly suggesting, matters.•

Tags:

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

May 8, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

typewritercartoonlady7

 

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

  1. the incredible bread machine film
  2. theo kamecke’s documentary moonwalk one
  3. moshé feldenkrais method
  4. george ripley’s brook farm utopia
  5. dorothy stratten story
  6. groucho discussing chaplin in playboy interview
  7. why has the marriage rate decline in the u.s.?
  8. mars one project flawed
  9. has violence in the world really declined?
  10. gm working on driverless cars

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

May 8, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Ted Cruz selected Carly Fiorina as Vice President of all the doggies.

This week, Ted Cruz selected Carly Fiorina as Vice President of all the doggies.

I’ll be making all the decisions now, Thelma and Louise.

Hurry, Louise, lets escape while we can.

Hurry, Louise, let’s escape while we can.

Capture them and rerurn the to me.

Capture them and return them to me.

Turn you engines off and place your paws in plain view.

Turn you engines off and place your paws in plain view.

Let's not get caught.

Let’s not get caught.

 

“It Seemed Very Much Like A Normal Conversation With A Human Being”

May 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

spaceschool

MOOCs mean more students, remote ones, who have lots of questions. To deal with the burden, Georgia Tech professor Ashok Goel, when offering an online Artificial Intelligence course, insinuated a robot Teaching Assistant powered by Watson into the proceedings. Most of the pupils never grew suspicious during their Q&As with the A.I. T.A., even a student who’d previously helped build Watson hardware. Does this demonstrate machine intelligence improving or humans becoming too passive in accepting what’s presented to them? Both, probably. It’s a dual lesson in technology and psychology.

From Melissa Korn at the Wall Street Journal:

Since January, “Jill,” as she was known to the artificial-intelligence class, had been helping graduate students design programs that allow computers to solve certain problems, like choosing an image to complete a logical sequence.

“She was the person—well, the teaching assistant—who would remind us of due dates and post questions in the middle of the week to spark conversations,” said student Jennifer Gavin.

Ms. Watson—so named because she’s powered by International Business Machines Corp.’s Watson analytics system—wrote things like “Yep!” and “we’d love to,” speaking on behalf of her fellow TAs, in the online forum where students discussed coursework and submitted projects.

“It seemed very much like a normal conversation with a human being,” Ms. Gavin said.

Shreyas Vidyarthi, another student, ascribed human attributes to the TA—imagining her as a friendly Caucasian 20-something on her way to a Ph.D. 

Students were told of their guinea-pig status last month. “I was flabbergasted,” said Mr. Vidyarthi.

“Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA,” said Petr Bela.•

Tags: , , , ,

“Just Four Years Ago, Petraeus Was Lionized As The Douglas MacArthur Of His Generation”

May 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Petraeus-Bush_981643c

During the darkest days of the second Bush Administration, the comedian Lewis Black had a great joke about hoping for the first time in his life that there would be a military coup in America. The politicians were so bad that the generals were clearly preferable.

At the center of the Army’s appeal stood David Petraeus, a talented commander who was built to mythical proportions out of political expedience, so that a President who’d lost the faith of the people could still operate abroad militarily. But his surge did not last. Like most heroes of convenience, the general was bound for a fall, but the extent of his defeat and surrender was shocking. Scandals personal and professional ended his brilliant career, even if he managed to avoid prison time.

The former CIA Director, now building equity on Wall Street, sat down for lunch with the Financial Times’ Edward Luce, who’s done some of the best writing on American politics during this crazy election year. The journalist finds a subject who doesn’t seem given to deep self-analysis despite his precipitous fall from grace. The opening:

On the dot of noon, as agreed, General David Petraeus strolls into the Four Seasons Restaurant. His arrival causes a flurry among the floor staff. Dressed in a navy blue suit and plain red tie, the former CIA chief is businesslike — in keeping with his new role on Wall Street. When I inquire what keeps him busy nowadays his answer goes on for so long I half regret asking. In addition to a lucrative job in private equity and a clutch of teaching jobs, he is “on the [paid] speaking circuit.” Chuckling, and in an apparent reference to Bernie Sanders’ attacks on Hillary Clinton’s gilded speaking career, he adds: “Many have noted it is the highest form of white-collar crime.” Only when I touch on the scandal that ended his meteoric public career does he assume a crisper tone.

Just four years ago, Petraeus was lionised as the Douglas MacArthur of his generation. Even discounting the hype, he stood head and shoulders above other US generals. In the depths of the Iraq war, when the country was undergoing death by a thousand improvised explosive devices, he was dubbed “King David” of Mosul — a city he cleared and held before it fell back into rebel hands. He was then appointed chief architect of George W Bush’s 2007 Iraq surge and, after a stint as head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, Barack Obama put him in charge of his own surge in Afghanistan. His reward was to be made head of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011. Many thought the CIA was a springboard for Petraeus’s own presidential ambitions. America loves a successful general and his approval ratings were stratospheric. Could anything stand in his way?

The answer was yes — David Petraeus himself. Shortly after Obama’s re-election in 2012, Petraeus abruptly resigned from the CIA when it emerged he had shared eight notebooks of classified information with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. They had also had an affair. Rarely has a fall from grace been so brutal.•

Tags: ,

“If It Was Up To Me We’d Bring Back Public Execution”

May 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trump-pasted_image_at_2016_05_06_12_23_am_480

The Trump campaign, the moral equivalent of Hitler using the N-word, stopped to take a leak in West Virginia. Some locals eagerly drank from that bowl because the hideous hotelier’s lies sound less polished than the ones they’ve heard before, because the promises he would break are different than other politicians’ broken promises. His words have an unfamiliar and angrier and more accusatory tone, placing the blame elsewhere, allowing the worst of our citizens to feel relieved of their flaws and failings.

This election season has shown us there are a surprising number of damaged, racist Americans who want to hold non-white people accountable for their problems, and the idea that all of them are poor, struggling folks is a falsehood. They come from all manner of background and financial situation and are united in that they look at Trump’s ugliness and see themselves.

Ben Jacobs’ of the Guardian has written an excellent account of rockhead visiting coal country. I will only say that I hope to never have Greg Bonecutter Jr. as my nurse. An excerpt:

The rally at the Charleston Civic Center, a brutalist hunk of concrete, started to fill up hours before Trump arrived and an orderly line outside dissolved into a horde of people desperate to make it into the event.

Greg Bonecutter Jr, a former nurse on disability from Letart, West Virginia, was an avid Trump supporter wearing a Make America Great Again hat and a shirt that proclaimed “Hillary sucks but not like Monica”.

He was a longtime Trump supporter who backed the nominee because he was someone with whom “you knew where you stood” and was sick “of politicians, big money scams and cover-up lies”. A registered independent, he said he thought Obama was “sucking Muslim tail and an apologist to terrorist actions” and “if it was up to me we’d bring back public execution and there’d be several trap doors on the White House lawn.” Bonecutter warned darkly that if Clinton was elected there might be another civil war.

Sandra Riddle of North Charleston shared his pessimism. She was worried about the supreme court and that if Clinton was elected “we might lose freedom of speech and assembly” as well as the second amendment. She wasn’t a gun owner but noted “we have to protect guns … because of people coming from Isis”.

Yet others simply liked Trump for his populist appeal.•

Tags: , , ,

Old Print Article: Famed Astrologer Evangeline Adams Succumbs, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1932)

May 6, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

EvangelineAdams

ievangeline

45evangeline

Of all the early 20th-century American astrologers, Evangeline Adams probably did the most to modernize and legitimize the craft, and that’s a shame.

Adams, installed in an apartment above Carnegie Hall at the end of her brilliant career, spent her early years dodging prison sentences for practicing fortune telling before the bullshit was legalized. She differentiated herself from the competition by updating the lexicon for the Industrial Age crowd, sprinkling her predictions with terms like “machines” and “electrical forces.” She was also quite adept at using her powers of persuasion to draw in gullible boldface names (Eugene O’Neill, Tallulah Bankhead, J. Pierpont Morgan, etc.), who gave her a cachet she would not have otherwise enjoyed. But the astrologer’s greatest gift may have been playing the press, aggressively publicizing those occasions she guessed correctly and making her many boneheaded pronouncements go quietly away.

In 1929, she uttered her worst prediction, telling a radio reporter the Dow Jones “could climb to Heaven” just weeks before the bottom fell out. Also interesting is that her most celebrated on-target prognostication, in which she said in 1923 that America would be engaged in a world war in 1942, looks less impressive if you read the fine print. WWII would be provoked, she asserted, when a second American Civil War spread all over the globe. Her 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle obituary, embedded below, lauds her “extraordinary record for accuracy.”

adams1

adams3

Tags:

“It Is Very Much About Trial And Error On An Enormous Scale”

May 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

rosietherobot-e1435092783710

If we our species or some version of it persists long enough, conscious machines will be possible–probable, even. We’ll ultimately pull apart the vast mystery of the human brain, and unlocking those secrets will begin us on a path to making machines that are SMART, not just smart. It’s worth pursuing a Big Data workaround, a shortcut to superintelligence, but that seems less a sure thing.

In an Edge interview, psychologist Gary Marcus is concerned that the brute force of Big Data may be leading us astray in the search for Artificial Intelligence. If you recall, in late January the NYU psychologist argued the DeepMind AlphaGo system was overhyped, but by March he was proven wrong. His other questions about our ability to widely apply such an AI remain unsettled, however. Marcus feels particularly strongly that driverless cars will be hampered by real-world uncertainty.

From Edge:

If you’re talking about having a robot in your home—I’m still dreaming of Rosie the robot that’s going to take care of my domestic situation—you can’t afford for it to make mistakes. The DeepMind system is very much about trial and error on an enormous scale. If you have a robot at home, you can’t have it run into your furniture too many times. You don’t want it to put your cat in the dishwasher even once. You can’t get the same scale of data. If you’re talking about a robot in a real-world environment, you need for it to learn things quickly from small amounts of data.                                 

The other thing is that in the Atari system, it might not be immediately obvious, but you have eighteen choices at any given moment. There are eight directions in which you can move your joystick or not move it, and you multiply that by either you press the fire button or you don’t. You get eighteen choices. In the real world, you often have infinite choices, or at least a vast number of choices. If you have only eighteen, you can explore: If I do this one, then I do this one, then I do this one—what’s my score? How about if I change this one? How about if I change that one?                                 

If you’re talking about a robot that could go anywhere in the room or lift anything or carry anything or press any button, you just can’t do the same brute force search of what’s going on. We lack for techniques that are able to do better than just these kinds of brute force things. All of this apparent progress is being driven by the ability to use brute force techniques on a scale we’ve never used before. That originally drove Deep Blue for chess and the Atari game system stuff. It’s driven most of what people are excited about. At the same time, it’s not extendable to the real world if you’re talking about domestic robots in the home or driving in the streets.•      

Tags:

“Things Will Start To Get Very Hot”

May 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

crowdwatchingapollolaunch

Would you like to survive if the sun dies? (When is actually more like it.) I would. Of course, I’ll be dead long before then, but in theory, anyway.

The sun will make Earth uninhabitable long before it completely burns out. Is it possible that our tools and technology will be so advanced in a couple hundred million years that we can “maintain” the sun or construct other ones as need be? Anything’s possible given enough time, I suppose, but other workarounds are likely more realistic.

In “How to Survive Doomsday,” an excellent Nautilus essay, Michael Hahn and Daniel Wolf Savin look at the daunting task of outlasting our star. An excerpt:

In a paltry 500 million years or so, no humans will remain on the surface of the Earth—at least, not outside of some hypothetical controlled environment. And things get worse from there. After the atmospheric CO2 is gone and no longer able to regulate Earth’s surface temperature, things will start to get very hot. In about a billion years, the average surface temperature will increase to above 45 degrees Celsius from the current 17 degrees Celsius. Important biochemical processes turn off at temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius, leaving most of the planetary surface uninhabitable. Animal life will need to migrate to the cooler poles to survive; but by 1.5 billion years from now, even the poles will be too hot. Not even cockroaches will survive.

Now, there are a few things we can do to stay our execution. We could, for example, move the Earth’s orbit. If we fired a 100 km wide asteroid on an elliptical orbit that passed close to the Earth every 5,000 years, we could slowly gravitationally nudge the planet’s orbit farther away from the sun, provided that we don’t accidentally hit the Earth. As a less precarious alternative, we could build a giant solar sail behind the Earth with enough mass to drag the planet away from the sun. Such a sail acts like a kite, where the photons from the sun are the wind and the gravity between the solar sail and the Earth acts as the string. The sail would need to have a diameter 20 times that of the Earth but a mass only about 2 percent that of Mt. Everest, a mere trillion metric tons. Strategies like these could, in principle, keep the Earth in the habitable zone until the sun expands into a red giant. (If some other civilization has already built such a large solar sail, we could detect it using the same photometric techniques that are currently used to find exoplanets.)

Another survival choice is more complicated—or simpler, depending on your perspective. The future Earth will actually be a pleasant home for non-biological life—better than it is today. For one thing, the brighter sun will provide more abundant solar power. The space weather will also be nicer. The sun is a dynamo spinning on its axis about every 24 days, generating giant magnetic storms that disrupt communication networks, overload power grids, and damage orbiting satellites. Robots today need fear that their circuits could be fried by a solar storm, such as the large solar storm in 1989 that caused a power failure across most of Quebec. Currently, such storms are estimated to occur about once or twice per century. But as the sun ages, this rotation slows down and the magnetic storms will abate.

Given these facts, we humans might simply decide to upload ourselves into machines, which would be relatively comfortable on the dystopic future Earth.•

Tags: ,

Old Print Article: The Ancient Toys Of Automata, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1887)

May 4, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

list-robots-digesting-duck-E

Speaking of automata through the ages, the article embedded below from the July 31, 1887 Brooklyn Daily Eagle surveys some highlights from the field, with special attention paid to 18th-century French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson, who breathed “life” into the Digesting Duck (pictured above), among other locomotion machines.

automata1800s

Tags:

“How Old Are The Fields Of Robotics And Artificial Intelligence?”

May 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Harvard_Theatre_Collection_-_Ajeeb_the_Wonderful_TCS_1.183_-_croppeddeepblue7890

When you love yourself, even mirrors aren’t enough.

Homo sapiens have always been fascinated by looking into the glass, so much so that attempts to create machine versions of ourselves snakes back to ancient times. Machines surpassing us physically–and perhaps eventually emotionally–seem to have sneaked up on us, but it’s been a long time coming.

In “Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence,” an excellent Public Domain Review article by Jessica Riskin, the Stanford historian writes the backstory of not only humanoid automata but efforts at all manner of simulacra. The opening:

How old are the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence? Many might trace their origins to the mid-twentieth century, and the work of people such as Alan Turing, who wrote about the possibility of machine intelligence in the ‘40s and ‘50s, or the MIT engineer Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics. But these fields have prehistories — traditions of machines that imitate living and intelligent processes — stretching back centuries and, depending how you count, even millennia.

The word “robot” made its first appearance in a 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek entitled R.U.R., for Rossum’s Universal Robots. Deriving his neologism from the Czech word “robota,” meaning “drudgery” or “servitude,” Čapek used “robot” to refer to a race of artificial humans who replace human workers in a futurist dystopia. (In fact, the artificial humans in the play are more like clones than what we would consider robots, grown in vats rather than built from parts.)

There was, however, an earlier word for artificial humans and animals, “automaton”, stemming from Greek roots meaning “self-moving”. This etymology was in keeping with Aristotle’s definition of living beings as those things that could move themselves at will. Self-moving machines were inanimate objects that seemed to borrow the defining feature of living creatures: self-motion. The first-century-AD engineer Hero of Alexandria described lots of automata. Many involved elaborate networks of siphons that activated various actions as the water passed through them, especially figures of birds drinking, fluttering, and chirping.•

Tags:

“Almost Every Day In The Moonshot Factory Is Messy”

May 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

googleglasstwigs

As I’ve mentioned before, Google does not want to be primarily a search giant in a decade. That would leave the company in a well-appointed grave. That’s why the X division–a bold attempt at a latter-day, privately held Bell Labs–is so critical, moonshots so meaningful. If the company hits on a few, it can reinvent itself on the fly.

Of course, what’s good for an individual corporation is much more of a mixed blessing for a society. Pretty much all of these endeavors have a surveillance aspect, can only be commodified by knowing where we are, what we’re doing and what we’re thinking. They’re aimed at moving us all inside the Plex.

In a Backchannel piece, Astro Teller, X Director and true believer, culls the cutting-room-floor material from his recent TED Talk to further discuss the creative process. It’s a mix of sound advice and Silicon Valley self-mythologizing. The opening:

Almost every day in the moonshot factory is messy. Even when you’re sure you’re learning lots of valuable things during weeks or months of frustration, everyone worries, “What happens if I fail? Will people laugh at me? Will I get fired?” At the end of the day, we all have to pay the bills and want the people around us to think highly of us. So it’s human nature to gravitate toward the paths that feel psychologically safe.

That’s why, if you want your team to be audacious, you have to make being audacious the path of least resistance. People have to feel safe even as they make mistakes or fail altogether — which means we, as managers and leaders, have to make it easy and rewarding to take risks and run enthusiastically at really hard things. Here are a few things we’ve tried at X so our emotional environment keeps us brave enough to say and act on things that have a very good chance of being wrong — and just might be crazy enough to be brilliant.•

Tags:

“What Do You Think Hillary Clinton’s Political Future Is?”

May 4, 2016 in Politics | Permalink

George Will needs to call out Geroge Stephanopoulos

George Will sucks at math. In 2012, right before he predicted Romney would beat Obama in a landslide, the pundit handicapped Hillary Clinton’s odds of becoming President in 2016. He failed spectacularly. The former Secretary of State may or may not win the general election but regardless of the outcome, Will’s calculations were yikes. He even thought Martin O’Malley had a better chance of reaching the Oval Office. From an appearance that year on Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing:

Alec Baldwin:

What do you think [Hillary Clinton’s] political future is?

George Will:

Zero. There’s a whole generation of coming candidates. Andrew Cuomo in New York. Governor O’Malley in Maryland. Countless people. Paul Ryan. All kinds of good people out there.•

 

“Connectivity Used To Be Just Entertainment”

May 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Car-phone-circea-1960jpg

Key to making driverless cars a going concern is enabling them to communicate with other vehicles, to receive constant updates, to have maps redrawn in real time. That conversation won’t only be amongst vehicles, however. It will involve all manner of smartphones and sensors and more, utilizing an Internet of Things approach in advance of a truly dense IoT.

In a Detroit News article by Neil Winton, Delphi Automotive executive Jeff Owens believes we may see fleets of driverless taxis popping up in municipalities within five years. Well, who knows? It wouldn’t stun me if someone tried it in that span, though there’ll still be lots of work to do. He touches on the connectivity issue. An excerpt:

Automotive manufacturers have made great strides in automating almost all functions, but it’s the final 5 percent which might be the hardest hurdle to jump. A self-driving car would be able to handle all kinds of physical decisions for braking, steering and avoiding other cars, but how would it handle a situation where a legal decision was required? …

“At the end of the day, technology won’t be the inhibitor, it will be the legal framework,” he said.

Owens said vehicle connectivity which allows cars to talk to each other and share data is building up ahead of full autonomy to improve safety and avoid accidents.

“Vehicle control algorithms will be ready to take on all kinds of problems including that cyclist example. Already cars like the Mercedes S class (its top-of-the-range sedan) and the Audi Q7 (SUV, and the Tesla Model S) allow you to set the auto pilot on the highway which allows hands-off driving. The driver will still be keeping watch, but it helps for a relaxed experience,” Owens said.

“Connectivity used to be just entertainment, now it’s vehicle-to-everything — literally really connected to everything like the infrastructure and providing cloud-based information that will help a safe journey,” he said.•

Tags:

“I Found Myself More And More Having To Look The Other Way”

May 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumpspeechtea8

The original American revolutionaries sometimes resembled a torch-carrying mob, but they were mostly crazy like foxes. The Tea Party born in 2009 is just plain crazy. A chemtrail of a political movement, it was steeped from the start in extreme paranoia and prejudice.

Many of those Republicans who thought they were creating a big tent when welcoming this sideshow into the center ring are now disgruntled that Donald Trump is their candidate. Funny thing is, Trump is really no different than traditional bigotry merchants Atwater and Rove, who gained power by more subtly selling racism and sexism. The hideous hotelier has merely replaced the dog whistles with dog bites, trading the soft, coded language of Gingrich for graphic soundbites about rape, assassination and genitalia. Funnier still (though not in a ha-ha way), the end result would remain the same should he become President, as Trump would use, as predecessors did, the greatest seat of U.S. power to tilt the game further in favor of the wealthiest.

Ben Howe is just such a conservative Rip Van Winkle, awakened too late to find that his complicity with Birthers and Truthers has ultimately unloosed his nightmare. From his Red State essay:

Allies aren’t friends. They may not even be colleagues. They are simply people that you find enough agreement with on enough issues to not go after each other. You don’t have to overtly support one another but you certainly don’t try to hurt each other.

As more and more people knew who I was and I fostered relationships and allies, I found myself more and more having to look the other way. Moments where I would cringe at something someone said, or quietly roll my eyes at a post they wrote, thinking “Gosh, I can’t believe they think that way” or “I swear that person is one tweet away from saying Obama is from Kenya.”

I justified it quietly to myself the way we had at the beginning of the tea party when such things would happen. People would say outlandish things and I would find myself nodding my head and awkwardly walking away, not calling them out for their silliness.

After all, there were more pressing matters.

And so, as I said, I kept quiet about these allies in new media and in Washington. People who I thought I agreed with only 70% of the time. Which normally is a great reason to consider someone an ally, but not when the other 30% is cringe-inducing paranoia and vapid stupidity.

I chose peace over principle. I chose to go along with those I disagreed with on core matters because I believed we were jointly fighting for other things that were more important.  I ignored my gut and my moral compass.

The result is that, almost to a man, every single person I cringed at or thought twice about, is now a supporter and cheerleader of Donald Trump.

I looked the other way, and I’m sure many others did too, as these people rose to prominence and their microphones got louder.  I ignored it at times because I hate self-righteous liberals who tell anyone they disagree with that they don’t want to be around them and I didn’t want to be like that. At other times because, well, it was easier than standing against foolishness.

I’m done with that now. Albeit a bit too late.•

Tags: ,

“What Consumers Found Unusual, Factories And Other Businesses May Not”

May 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

bringlass

Google Glass may in some form be the future, but what a huge fiasco it was annals of product development. The narrative within the Plex is that the uncool tool was introduced to the market too soon, before all the kinks had been worked out, but that’s blind to its bigger, existential problem: It was a Segway for your face.

As an Economist piece points out, however, a vision that’s not a winner in public parks may be one within the office park. One way or another, Augmented Reality will likely become a boon companion in the workplace. The opening:

AHEAD of its time or just plain weird? Whatever the answer, Google last year stopped selling consumer prototypes of its controversial Google Glass, a camera-equipped head-mounted display resembling a pair of spectacles. Using a process known as augmented reality (AR), Glass can display in the viewer’s line of sight information about what they are looking at, among other things.

What consumers found unusual, factories and other businesses may not. Workers are often required to wear odd-looking safety equipment, such as helmets and protective glasses. It is more normal to be filmed. And indeed, the workplace is where AR equipment is taking hold, which is why Google is revamping Glass with business uses in mind.

Engineers that work on and repair transformers that distribute electricity can spend up to half their time searching for technical data in assorted software, databases, activity logs and even old-fashioned filing cabinets, says Alain Dedieu, a vice-president in the Shanghai operations of Schneider Electric. The French multinational is now testing AR systems that make the technical information that is being sought appear before their engineers’ eyes.•

“They Were Treated As Disposable Outsiders”

May 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

SHORPY_03785u

Facebook doesn’t likely give a frig about journalism and cares even less for journalists. Excellent reportage may as well be Angry Birds or emoticons or some other empty calories. If Zuckerberg’s nation-state could make more money by offering absolutely no journalism, by erasing every last bit of it from the social network, it likely wouldn’t hesitate to do so. The company has absolutely no commitment to journalism, because that’s not the business Facebook is in. It’s in the money business. The company’s so-called mutually beneficial arrangement with traditional news publishers may ultimately play out like a zero-sum game.

The opening of a Gizmodo piece by Michael Nuñez about the unpleasantness of the social network’s trending-news department:

Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week, and the social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news,” he said in a Q&A last year, adding that he wants Facebook Instant Articles to be the “primary news experience people have.”

Facebook’s stranglehold over the traffic pipe has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $350 billion behemoth, and the news business has been caught up in a jittery debate about what, precisely, the company’s intentions are. Will it swallow the business whole, or does it really just want publishers to put neat things in users’ news feeds? For its part, Facebook—which has recently begun paying publishers including Buzzfeed and the New York Times to post a quota of Facebook Live videos every week—bills its relationship with the media as a mutually beneficial landlord-tenant partnership.

But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm.•

Tags: ,

“Perhaps The Book Offers A Very Specific Respite”

May 3, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

three-christs_1024x1024

If it wasn’t for the miraculous New York Review Books imprint, I may have never read Moravagine or The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, and then where would I be? Those two are giants, and there have been a lot of other pleasures, titles by Freeman Dyson and Dorothy Baker and Robert Sheckley.

I’m not as dour about literary publishing as, say, Philip Roth. It’s been increasingly difficult in the Digital Age to monetize such a field, but I think the demand is there and will always be there, no matter how many among us are binge-watching TV or “liking” our “friends.” I can’t guarantee there will always be a Broadway, but as long as there are humans, there will be theater. Telling stories is ingrained in us. The same is true, I think, of great literature.

At the Paris Review blog, Susannah Hunnewell has a smart interview with NYRB founder, Edwin Frank. An excerpt:

Question:

Were you surprised by how successful the series has been?

Edwin Frank:

The point of the series should be to get the books out there, spread the news, and to pay its way. It does pay its way. You could say the series started at a difficult but also opportune moment in a still ongoing crisis in publishing, a difficult business. Because this last decade has been a time when more than ever books are getting pushed aside by other kinds of entertainments and sources of information, and that has been a challenge for publishers and contributed to the decline of the independent bookstore that went on for so long and seemed inevitable. But in fact it’s changed. The decline has not only stopped but been reversed, and I imagine that’s because with books and literature under siege people who really care about books and literature care about them all the more. They want to defend them and seeing them as something you have to defend can put them in new light, makes you think again. What is it I love about these things? What difference do they make? And then again for people growing up with all the gadgets, perhaps the book offers a very specific respite, a place apart, a welcomingly unsocial medium, you could say. That may be going on, too. In any case, this ancient space of books has been changed by the new economy and the new technology. It doesn’t feel the way it used to feel—it feels threatened in some ways—but you can feel it all the more and feel it’s there to explore precisely because it can’t be taken for granted. Old as it is it feels different and in fact new and I think that may help to account for the new independent bookstores opening up, as well as for the success of our series and adventurous publishers like Archipelago.•

 

Tags: ,

“He Soon Became A Paganini Of Pitchmen”

May 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

When salesmen began traveling by airwaves rather than highways, Philip Kives was the king of the road.

The Canadian-born wheeler and dealer’s company, K-Tel, had a knack for making and marketing products you didn’t really need but wanted nonetheless: Veg-O-Matics, Bonsai Knives, Sno-Bloc Makers. They were designed well, packaged handsomely, priced fairly and they sold, oh how they sold. Perhaps just as impressive as the plastic and metal pieces themselves was the tagline on the ubiquitous ads, “As Seen on TV,” which ingeniously seemed to confer some status upon the odd items while feeding our psychological need for viral, communal participation long before the Internet made instant the gratification of that urge. 

The excellent New York Times writer Margalit Fox penned a postmortem of Kives, who just died. An excerpt:

If K-tel’s rhetoric seemed sprung from the lips of an old-time midway barker, there was a reason: As a young man, Mr. Kives had plied that trade, hawking cookware and other goods at county fairs and on the boardwalk of Atlantic City.

By all accounts as skilled a salesman in person as he was en masse, he was one of the last living links between the “Step right up!” pitchman of the early 20th century and his expansive electronic-age heir.

Philip Kives was all but born scrappy, in a Jewish agricultural colony near Oungre, Saskatchewan, on Feb. 12, 1929. His parents, Kiva and the former Lily Weiner, had met and married in Turkey, where they had been settled by the Jewish Colonization Association to avoid persecution in their native Eastern Europe.

In 1926, the organization resettled the Kives family once more — to a farm on the Canadian prairie with neither electricity nor running water.

Amid the Depression, they battled drought, crop failure and insect infestations that seemed to rival the biblical plagues, living for many years on welfare. Philip grew up milking cows, hauling drinking water and earning money by trapping weasels and selling their fur.

In 1957, the young Mr. Kives left the farm for Winnipeg, where he worked as a cabby and a short-order cook. He began selling sewing machines and vacuum cleaners door to door, following the wires strung over newly electrified parts of town to find and court his customers.

He soon became a Paganini of pitchmen, hawking products at fairs throughout Canada and the United States.•

When music was as much held as listened to, the Record Selector and Tape Selector came in handy.

Tags: ,

A Note From 1952 About Computerized Journalism

May 2, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

univac11_custom-d1f68dfc20a6ede568299ba03659c2775bfd3f2b-s6-c30

From the November 3, 1952 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

univac128

The Univac 1 computer got off to a good start in 1952 when it predicted that Eisenhower would win easily over Stevenson even though the press thought the reverse outcome was a near-certainty. It faltered a bit in the 1954 midterm Senate races and was mocked. (“Tilt!” was hollered in the newsroom by one wiseass when it became clear that the prognostications were errant.) But by the 1956 Presidential election, the computer once more nailed the Eisenhower triumph over Stevenson. No TV broadcast of any major election ever went without a computer again. 

In this 1952 clip, Walter Cronkite cedes the floor the machine which at this early point in the night thought Eisenhower was a 100-1 favorite to win. Nervous CBS brass were so concerned that the “electronic brain” was wrong that they initially pretended it had mechanical difficulties and was being unresponsive.

“The Memory Was Very Vivid…Yet It Was Completely False”

May 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

We think we’re the captains of our own vessels, but then our brains remind us we’re merely passengers. 

Some experience this phenomenon of being prone to our own heads in an even more pronounced way. In his latest excellent piece for BBC Future, David Robson writes of a man whose illness left him with a brain that created fictional “memories” for him. The effect is called “confabulation,” with the organ alternating between narratives true and untrue, with the “reader” left to fathom what’s what.

The opening:

A few months after his brain surgery, Matthew returned to work as a computer programmer. He knew it was going to be a challenge – he had to explain to his boss that he was living with a permanent brain injury.

“What actually happened at the meeting was that the employers said, ‘How can we help you, how can we make you fit back into work and get back on your feet again?’” Matthew explains. “That’s what they said. But my recollection the next day was that they were going to fire me – there was no way they could allow me back into work.”

The memory was very vivid – he says – just as believable as anything that had actually happened. Yet it was completely false. Today, Matthew knows it was one of the first signs that he was suffering from “confabulation” as a result of his brain injury. Confabulators don’t mean to lie or mislead, but some fundamental problems with the way they process memories mean they often struggle to tell fact from a fiction concocted by their unconscious mind.

The discovery was another painful blow to Matthew (whose name has been changed to preserve his privacy). “I was really scared – I thought I can’t trust what’s actually happened.”

His dilemma, although extreme, can help us all to understand the frailties of our memories, and the ways our minds construct their own versions of reality.•

Tags:

“He Believes People Who Have Already Been Born Could Live For Ten Centuries”

May 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Molecular-biologist-Aubre-006

Aubrey de Grey might be right, eventually.

The gerontologist believes someone currently alive will live ten centuries, that immortality is inevitable, if we simply work to make it so. If Homo sapiens persists long enough, that might be true, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. De Grey, after all, said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” If it were so, 72-year-olds everywhere would have a right to be excited, but alas. 

The scientist is still playing the 1,000-year game, as evidenced by an Express article by Jon Austin. The opening:

Dr Aubrey de Grey believes people who have already been born could live for ten centuries because of ongoing research being done into “repairing the effects of ageing.”

He hopes to ultimately create preventative treatments that mean humans would be able to consistently re-repair and live as long as 1,000 years or possible even forever.

British-born Mr de Grey, who graduated from Cambridge University in 1985 insists he is one of very few scientists looking at preventing, rather than slowing down ageing, and is perplexed why there is not huge focus on it.

He told the actuary.com: “To me, ageing was the world’s most important problem. It was so obvious that I never tested the assumption. I always presumed that everyone else thought the same.”

But his theory for repairing ageing has not been widely accepted by peers.

He said: “People have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable, and I have to keep explaining that it is not.•

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »