Saturday, July 16, 2011
The Beekeeper's Lament
by Maggie Koerth-Baker
What's killing the bees? After reading The Beekeeper's Lament —Hannah Nordhaus' lyrical, haunting book about the complicated lives and deaths of America's honeybees—my question has shifted more towards, "Good lord, what doesn't kill bees?"
Domesticated bees turn out to be some amazingly fragile creatures. In fact, Nordhaus writes, bees were delicate even before the modern age of industrial farming. It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century that humans were able to reliably domesticate bees. Even then, beekeeping was anything but a stable business to be in. But in the last decade, the job has gotten harder, and the bee deaths have piled up faster. Bees are killed by moths and mites, bacteria and viruses, heat and cold. They're killed by the pesticides used on the plants they pollinate, and by the other pesticides used to protect them from murderous insects. And they're killed by the almond crop, which draws millions of bees from all over the nation to one small region of California, where they join in an orgy of pollination and another of disease sharing.
None of this negates the seriousness of Colony Collapse Disorder, that still-mysterious ailment that reduced more than 1/3 of America's healthy beehives to empty boxes in 2007. But what Nordhaus does (and does well) is put those famous losses into a broader context. Colony Collapse Disorder is a problem. But it isn't the problem. Instead, it's just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn't just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along. In the years since 2007, Nordhaus writes, bees have died at a rate higher than the expected and "acceptable" 15% annual loss, but the majority of those deaths weren't always caused by CCD.
The picture of bee maladies that Nordhaus paints isn't a pretty one. The bees continue to be extremely important to our national food system, and they continue to die in numbers that are far more vast than the normally high death rates beekeepers have always dealt with. Worse, there's no easy answer. At least not one that scientific evidence has been able to pin down yet. If you're looking for a simple solution—if you want somebody to justify your pet explanation, whether pesticides, or GMOs, or totally natural causes that have nothing to do with modern farming practices—then you probably won't like what Nordhaus has to say.
But if you're interested in the real complexity behind the headlines, you're in luck. There's so much going on in this book, details that are vitally important to understanding how modern beekeeping works and what happens when it fails, and which almost never make it into the short articles and TV segments. Nordhaus doesn't even really start talking about Colony Collapse Disorder in an in-depth way until chapter 6. And that's a good thing. By the time you get to that chapter, it's clear that she couldn't have written about it any sooner. There's too much context that you need to understand before you can really make sense of that hot-button issue.
Better yet, Nordhaus manages to wrap all that nuance up in some of the best narrative and storytelling I've had the pleasure of reading since Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Like Skloot, Nordhaus owes some of the credit to the fact that her primary source is a fabulous character to hang a story on. John Miller, the professional beekeeper whose work and adventures set the stage for Nordhaus' reporting, is curmudgeonly and charming, hard-headed and hilarious. He's a conservative farmer who likes fast cars, loves his bees, and writes Nordhaus emails that read like Zen koans. Even when it's clear that some of the practices that keep people like Miller in business are also hurting the bee populations, it's hard not to root for him, as a person.
Nordhaus puts the bee panic into perspective, and Miller puts a human face on the complexities and contradictions behind it. Before you build a beehive, before you post another Internet forum message about what absolutely just has to be killing the bees, you must read this book.
The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America by Hannah Nordhaus
Image: Return of the Bee, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from mightyboybrian's photostream
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Ali Now
by Cal Fussman MUHAMMAD ALI came through the double doors into the living room of his hotel suite on slow, tender steps. I held out my hand. He opened his arms. Ali lowered himself into a wide, soft chair, and I sat on an adjacent sofa. "I've come," I said, "to ask about the wisdom you've taken from all you've been through." Ali seemed preoccupied with his right hand, which was trembling over his right thigh, and he did not speak. "George Foreman told me that you were the most important man in the world. When I asked him why, he said that when you walked into a room, it didn't matter who was there--presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, movie stars--everybody turned toward you. The most famous person in that room was wondering, Should I go to meet him? Or stay here? He said you were the most important man in the world because you made everybody else's heart beat faster."
The shaking in Ali's right hand seemed to creep above his elbow. Both of his arms were quivering now, and his breaths were short and quick.
I leaned in awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do. Half a minute passed in silence. I wondered if I should call for his wife.
Ali stooped over, and now his whole body was trembling and his breaths were almost gasps.
"Champ! You okay? You okay?"
Ali's head lifted and slowly turned to me with the smile of an eight-year-old.
"Scared ya, huh?" he said.
Ali was in Dublin for the opening ceremonies of the Special Olympics. A van pulled up outside the hotel, and it was with much effort that he slowly lifted himself into the front seat. And yet as soon as the driver pulled out onto the road, the left-hand side of the road, Ali was waving his arms in a childish portent of doom and gasping, "Head-on collision! Head-on collision!"
There were four of us in the back: Ali's wife, Lonnie, who is fourteen years younger than Ali and who grew up across the street from his childhood home in Louisville; his best friend, Howard Bingham, a photographer he met in 1962 and who's snapped more pictures of Ali than anyone has ever taken of anybody; and a businessman named Harlan Werner, who's organized public appearances for Ali during the last sixteen years.
Jet lag had come to dinner with all of us as we took our table near a flower-filled courtyard at Ernie's Restaurant. Ali asked for a felt-tipped pen, and while the rest of us talked he pushed his plate and silverware out of the way, spread out his cloth napkin, and began to draw on it. First he sketched a boxing ring, then two stick figures, one of which he labeled "Ali" in a cartoon bubble and the other "Frazier." Then he began to set in the crowd around the ring in the form of dots. Tens of dots, then hundreds of dots, then thousands, his right hand driving the pen down again and again as if to say: And he saw it! And he saw it! And she saw it! And he saw it!
Occasionally, Ali would stop, examine his canvas for empty space, and then go on, jackhammering in more dots. It must have taken him more than twenty minutes to squeeze all of humanity onto the napkin. Then he signed his name inside a huge heart and handed it to me.
"Thank you," I said.
"That'll be ten dollars, please," he whispered.
And that was the way it was with Ali. You just couldn't help laughing, even when you knew he'd play that same line off the next hundred people. No matter how many times he told a fresh face, "You ain't as dumb as you look," it worked.
But watching him eat was awkward. His right hand picked up a piece of lamb and trembled as he tried to bring it to his lips. He did not eat very much. His sciatic nerve was paining him, he was tired, and it was best to go back to the hotel.
On the way to the door, the diners at the other tables--every one of them--stood and applauded. Ali moved gingerly, almost painfully, and then, all of a sudden, he bit his bottom lip, took a mock swing at one of the applauding men, and the restaurant roared with laughter.
Read more:
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That Stalling Feeling
by Nouriel Roubini
NEW YORK – Despite the series of low-probability, high-impact events that have hit the global economy in 2011, financial markets continued to rise happily until a month or so ago. The year began with rising food, oil, and commodity prices, giving rise to the specter of high inflation. Then massive turmoil erupted in the Middle East, further ratcheting up oil prices. Then came Japan’s terrible earthquake, which severely damaged both its economy and global supply chains. And then Greece, Ireland, and Portugal lost access to credit markets, requiring bailout packages from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.
But that was not the end of it. Although Greece was bailed out a year ago, Plan A has now clearly failed. Greece will require another official bailout – or a bail-in of private creditors, an option that is fueling heated disagreement among European policymakers.
Lately, concerns about America’s unsustainable fiscal deficits have, likewise, resulted in ugly political infighting, almost leading to a government shutdown. A similar battle is now brewing about America’s “debt ceiling,” which, if unresolved, introduces the risk of a “technical” default on US public debt.
Until recently, markets seemed to discount these shocks; apart from a few days when panic about Japan or the Middle East caused a correction, they continued their upward march. But, since the end of April, a more persistent correction in global equity markets has set in, driven by worries that economic growth in the United States and worldwide may be slowing sharply.
Data from the US, the United Kingdom, the periphery of the eurozone, Japan, and even emerging-market economies is signaling that part of the global economy – especially advanced economies – may be stalling, if not dropping into a double-dip recession. Global risk-aversion has also increased, as the option of further “extend and pretend” or “delay and pray” on Greece is becoming less desirable, and the specter of a disorderly workout is becoming more likely.
Optimists argue that the global economy has merely hit a “soft patch.” Firms and consumers reacted to this year’s shocks by “temporarily” slowing consumption, capital spending, and job creation. As long as the shocks don’t worsen (and as some become less acute), confidence and growth will recover in the second half of the year, and stock markets will rally again.
But there are good reasons to believe that we are experiencing a more persistent slump. First, the problems of the eurozone periphery are in some cases problems of actual insolvency, not illiquidity: large and rising public and private deficits and debt; damaged financial systems that need to be cleaned up and recapitalized; massive loss of competitiveness; lack of economic growth; and rising unemployment. It is no longer possible to deny that public and/or private debts in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal will need to be restructured.
Read more:
NEW YORK – Despite the series of low-probability, high-impact events that have hit the global economy in 2011, financial markets continued to rise happily until a month or so ago. The year began with rising food, oil, and commodity prices, giving rise to the specter of high inflation. Then massive turmoil erupted in the Middle East, further ratcheting up oil prices. Then came Japan’s terrible earthquake, which severely damaged both its economy and global supply chains. And then Greece, Ireland, and Portugal lost access to credit markets, requiring bailout packages from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.
But that was not the end of it. Although Greece was bailed out a year ago, Plan A has now clearly failed. Greece will require another official bailout – or a bail-in of private creditors, an option that is fueling heated disagreement among European policymakers. Lately, concerns about America’s unsustainable fiscal deficits have, likewise, resulted in ugly political infighting, almost leading to a government shutdown. A similar battle is now brewing about America’s “debt ceiling,” which, if unresolved, introduces the risk of a “technical” default on US public debt.
Until recently, markets seemed to discount these shocks; apart from a few days when panic about Japan or the Middle East caused a correction, they continued their upward march. But, since the end of April, a more persistent correction in global equity markets has set in, driven by worries that economic growth in the United States and worldwide may be slowing sharply.
Data from the US, the United Kingdom, the periphery of the eurozone, Japan, and even emerging-market economies is signaling that part of the global economy – especially advanced economies – may be stalling, if not dropping into a double-dip recession. Global risk-aversion has also increased, as the option of further “extend and pretend” or “delay and pray” on Greece is becoming less desirable, and the specter of a disorderly workout is becoming more likely.
Optimists argue that the global economy has merely hit a “soft patch.” Firms and consumers reacted to this year’s shocks by “temporarily” slowing consumption, capital spending, and job creation. As long as the shocks don’t worsen (and as some become less acute), confidence and growth will recover in the second half of the year, and stock markets will rally again.
But there are good reasons to believe that we are experiencing a more persistent slump. First, the problems of the eurozone periphery are in some cases problems of actual insolvency, not illiquidity: large and rising public and private deficits and debt; damaged financial systems that need to be cleaned up and recapitalized; massive loss of competitiveness; lack of economic growth; and rising unemployment. It is no longer possible to deny that public and/or private debts in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal will need to be restructured.
Read more:
Friday, July 15, 2011
Friday Book Club - The Liar's Club
Imagine you are a child of 7 and this is your sharpest memory: "Our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor. . . . He was pulling at the hem of my favorite nightgown. . . . 'Show me the marks,' he said. 'Come on, now. I won't hurt you.' "
Thus opens "The Liars' Club," Mary Karr's haunting memoir of growing up in East Texas in the early 1960's, virtually motherless, and fiercely seeking to understand her parents, their lives and their relationship to her sister and herself.
Daddy drank every day, but "he never missed a day of work in 42 years at the plant; never cried -- on the morning after -- that he felt some ax wedged in his forehead; never drew his belt from his pant loops to strap on us or got weepy over cowboy songs the way some guys down at the Legion did." Mother was a different story. "Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee."
A reader could conclude that no one speaks in this memoir except the narrator, and that would be almost true. But even mute, this mother is the story; give or take a few exceptions, she's the whole story. Charlie Marie Moore Karr, a k a Mother, is a huge enigma that by her very presence, her silent, raging sadness and fierce passions dominates the family. She is an enigma not only to her daughters and husband, but to the set of children whom she abandoned years before giving birth to Mary and her older sister, Lecia, and whose existence she has held as a corrosive secret. And she has remained an enigma to everyone, including the six men she has married and divorced, even Daddy, J. P. Karr, whom she married twice.
The Liars' Club turns out to be just a place where the men meet on their days off to play dominoes and drink in the back room of the bait shop. Mary Karr's father is mainly just a regular guy. It is her mother who takes on enormous, suffocating dimension.
As Mother rarely speaks, it is left to the imagination of the daughters to attempt to translate her silences. While Daddy, who works in the oilfields of Leechfield, where Agent Orange is manufactured, has a sweet steady Texas grit, Mother has what her daughter calls East Coast longings. She is too refined for Texas, and is "adjudged more or less permanently Nervous." Born in West Texas, she had gone to New York, where she spent her youth and first marriages and went to the opera and to museums. Back in East Texas, she reads Camus and Sartre and tries to throw herself out of speeding cars while drunk.
In Mary's eyes, the most admirable thing about Charlie is that she's a painter. Daddy and his card-playing buddies in the Liars' Club build her a studio in the back of their house, and the first thing she paints on her visits home from caring for her own mother is "a portrait of Grandma . . . from a Polaroid taken just before Grandma lost the leg."
Shortly before the major catastrophe that's about to happen to these girls, Ms. Karr notes, "I see Mother's face wearing that thousand-yard stare. . . . The back door she's staring through opens on a wet black night." Charlie is immeasurably, palpably sad. Her art, in the end, is not enough to hold her -- nor is any art. She just reads Tolstoy, plays old Bessie Smith records and cries.
Read more:
Thus opens "The Liars' Club," Mary Karr's haunting memoir of growing up in East Texas in the early 1960's, virtually motherless, and fiercely seeking to understand her parents, their lives and their relationship to her sister and herself.Daddy drank every day, but "he never missed a day of work in 42 years at the plant; never cried -- on the morning after -- that he felt some ax wedged in his forehead; never drew his belt from his pant loops to strap on us or got weepy over cowboy songs the way some guys down at the Legion did." Mother was a different story. "Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee."
A reader could conclude that no one speaks in this memoir except the narrator, and that would be almost true. But even mute, this mother is the story; give or take a few exceptions, she's the whole story. Charlie Marie Moore Karr, a k a Mother, is a huge enigma that by her very presence, her silent, raging sadness and fierce passions dominates the family. She is an enigma not only to her daughters and husband, but to the set of children whom she abandoned years before giving birth to Mary and her older sister, Lecia, and whose existence she has held as a corrosive secret. And she has remained an enigma to everyone, including the six men she has married and divorced, even Daddy, J. P. Karr, whom she married twice.
The Liars' Club turns out to be just a place where the men meet on their days off to play dominoes and drink in the back room of the bait shop. Mary Karr's father is mainly just a regular guy. It is her mother who takes on enormous, suffocating dimension.
As Mother rarely speaks, it is left to the imagination of the daughters to attempt to translate her silences. While Daddy, who works in the oilfields of Leechfield, where Agent Orange is manufactured, has a sweet steady Texas grit, Mother has what her daughter calls East Coast longings. She is too refined for Texas, and is "adjudged more or less permanently Nervous." Born in West Texas, she had gone to New York, where she spent her youth and first marriages and went to the opera and to museums. Back in East Texas, she reads Camus and Sartre and tries to throw herself out of speeding cars while drunk.
In Mary's eyes, the most admirable thing about Charlie is that she's a painter. Daddy and his card-playing buddies in the Liars' Club build her a studio in the back of their house, and the first thing she paints on her visits home from caring for her own mother is "a portrait of Grandma . . . from a Polaroid taken just before Grandma lost the leg."
Shortly before the major catastrophe that's about to happen to these girls, Ms. Karr notes, "I see Mother's face wearing that thousand-yard stare. . . . The back door she's staring through opens on a wet black night." Charlie is immeasurably, palpably sad. Her art, in the end, is not enough to hold her -- nor is any art. She just reads Tolstoy, plays old Bessie Smith records and cries.
Read more:
Everyone's So Smart Now!
by Catherine Rampell
We’ve written before about some of the work of Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, grade inflation chroniclers extraordinaire. They have put together a new, comprehensive study of college grading over the decades, and let me tell you, it is a doozy.
The researchers collected historical data on letter grades awarded by more than 200 four-year colleges and universities. Their analysis (published in the Teachers College Record) confirm that the share of A grades awarded has skyrocketed over the years. Take a look at the red line in the chart below, which refers to the share of grades given that are A’s:
Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy Note: 1940 and 1950 (nonconnected data points in figure) represent averages from 1935 to 1944 and 1945 to 1954, respectively. Data from 1960 onward represent annual averages in their database, smoothed with a three-year centered moving average.
Most recently, about 43 percent of all letter grades given were A’s, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. The distribution of B’s has stayed relatively constant; the growing share of A’s instead comes at the expense of a shrinking share of C’s, D’s and F’s. In fact, only about 10 percent of grades awarded are D’s and F’s.
As we have written before, private colleges and universities are by far the biggest offenders on grade inflation, even when you compare private schools to equally selective public schools. Here’s another chart showing the grading curves for public versus private schools in the years 1960, 1980 and 2007:
As you can see, public and private school grading curves started out as relatively similar, and gradually pulled further apart. Both types of institutions made their curves easier over time, but private schools made their grades much easier.
Read more:
ps. Thanks to Hairpin for the great title.
We’ve written before about some of the work of Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, grade inflation chroniclers extraordinaire. They have put together a new, comprehensive study of college grading over the decades, and let me tell you, it is a doozy.
The researchers collected historical data on letter grades awarded by more than 200 four-year colleges and universities. Their analysis (published in the Teachers College Record) confirm that the share of A grades awarded has skyrocketed over the years. Take a look at the red line in the chart below, which refers to the share of grades given that are A’s:
Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy Note: 1940 and 1950 (nonconnected data points in figure) represent averages from 1935 to 1944 and 1945 to 1954, respectively. Data from 1960 onward represent annual averages in their database, smoothed with a three-year centered moving average.
Most recently, about 43 percent of all letter grades given were A’s, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. The distribution of B’s has stayed relatively constant; the growing share of A’s instead comes at the expense of a shrinking share of C’s, D’s and F’s. In fact, only about 10 percent of grades awarded are D’s and F’s.
As we have written before, private colleges and universities are by far the biggest offenders on grade inflation, even when you compare private schools to equally selective public schools. Here’s another chart showing the grading curves for public versus private schools in the years 1960, 1980 and 2007:
Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy Note: 1960 and 1980 data represent averages from 1959–1961 and 1979–1981, respectively.
As you can see, public and private school grading curves started out as relatively similar, and gradually pulled further apart. Both types of institutions made their curves easier over time, but private schools made their grades much easier.
Read more:
ps. Thanks to Hairpin for the great title.
Thanks for Sharing
by Felix Salmon
Is there a company in the world which isn’t trying to “harness and leverage the power of social media to amplify our brand” or somesuch? I’m a pretty small fish in the Twitter pond, and I get asked on a very regular basis to talk to various marketing types about how they should be using Twitter. A smart organization with a big Twitter presence, then, will naturally start trying to leverage its ability to leverage Twitter by putting together sophisticated presentations full of “insights to help marketers align their content-sharing strategies” and the like. Which is exactly what the New York Times has just done.
The slideshow can be found here, and it’s worth downloading just to see how many photos the NYT art department could find of good-looking young people looking happy in minimalist houses. But it actually includes some interesting insights, too, which were spelled out at a conference yesterday by Brian Brett of the NYT Customer Research Group.
The survey claims to be the first of its kind on why people share content, which is a very good question. A large part of how people enjoy themselves online these days is by creating and sharing content, which is both exciting and a little bit scary for anybody in a media organization. And the NYT methodology was fun, too: aside from the standard surveys and interviews, they asked a bunch of people who don’t normally share much to spend a week sharing a lot; and they also asked a lot of heavy sharers to spend a week sharing nothing. (“It was like quitting smoking,” said one, “only harder”.)
The first striking insight is about the degree to which the act of sharing deepens understanding. It’s not at all surprising to learn that 85% of people say that they use other people’s responses to help them understand and process information — in fact 100% of people do that, and they’ve been doing it for centuries. We always react to news and information in large part by looking at how other people react to it.
But more interesting is the fact that 73% of people say that the simple act of sharing a piece of information with others makes them likely to process that information more deeply and thoughtfully. It’s like writing things down to remember them: the more you engage with something, the more important and salient it becomes to you.
Is there a company in the world which isn’t trying to “harness and leverage the power of social media to amplify our brand” or somesuch? I’m a pretty small fish in the Twitter pond, and I get asked on a very regular basis to talk to various marketing types about how they should be using Twitter. A smart organization with a big Twitter presence, then, will naturally start trying to leverage its ability to leverage Twitter by putting together sophisticated presentations full of “insights to help marketers align their content-sharing strategies” and the like. Which is exactly what the New York Times has just done.
The slideshow can be found here, and it’s worth downloading just to see how many photos the NYT art department could find of good-looking young people looking happy in minimalist houses. But it actually includes some interesting insights, too, which were spelled out at a conference yesterday by Brian Brett of the NYT Customer Research Group.
The survey claims to be the first of its kind on why people share content, which is a very good question. A large part of how people enjoy themselves online these days is by creating and sharing content, which is both exciting and a little bit scary for anybody in a media organization. And the NYT methodology was fun, too: aside from the standard surveys and interviews, they asked a bunch of people who don’t normally share much to spend a week sharing a lot; and they also asked a lot of heavy sharers to spend a week sharing nothing. (“It was like quitting smoking,” said one, “only harder”.)
The first striking insight is about the degree to which the act of sharing deepens understanding. It’s not at all surprising to learn that 85% of people say that they use other people’s responses to help them understand and process information — in fact 100% of people do that, and they’ve been doing it for centuries. We always react to news and information in large part by looking at how other people react to it.
But more interesting is the fact that 73% of people say that the simple act of sharing a piece of information with others makes them likely to process that information more deeply and thoughtfully. It’s like writing things down to remember them: the more you engage with something, the more important and salient it becomes to you.
Don't Be Evil
By Evgeny Morozov
July 13, 2011
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
By Steven Levy
The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
By Siva Vaidhyanathan
I.
For cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists alike, the advent of Google marks off two very distinct periods in Internet history. The optimists remember the age before Google as chaotic, inefficient, and disorganized. Most search engines at the time had poor ethics (some made money by misrepresenting ads as search results) and terrible algorithms (some could not even find their parent companies online). All of that changed when two Stanford graduate students invented an ingenious way to rank Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. Other innovations spurred by Google—especially its novel platform for selling highly targeted ads—have created a new “ecosystem” (the optimists’ favorite buzzword) for producing and disseminating information. Thanks to Google, publishers of all stripes—from novice bloggers in New Delhi to media mandarins in New York—could cash in on their online popularity.
Cyber-pessimists see things quite differently. They wax nostalgic for the early days of the Web when discovery was random, and even fun. They complain that Google has destroyed the joy of serendipitous Web surfing, while its much-celebrated ecosystem is just a toxic wasteland of info-junk. Worse, it’s being constantly polluted by a contingent of “content farms” that produce trivial tidbits of information in order to receive a hefty advertising paycheck from the Googleplex. The skeptics charge that the company treats information as a commodity, trivializing the written word and seeking to turn access to knowledge into a dubious profit-center. Worst of all, Google’s sprawling technology may have created a digital panopticon, making privacy obsolete.
Both camps like to stress that Google is a unique enterprise that stands apart from the rest of Silicon Valley. The optimists do this to convince the public that the company’s motives are benign. If only we could bring ourselves to trust Google, their logic goes, its bright young engineers would deliver us the revolutionary services that we could never expect from our governments. The pessimists make a more intriguing case: for them, the company is so new, sly, and fluid, and the threats that it poses to society are so invisible, insidious, and monumental, that regulators may not yet have the proper analytical models to understand its true market and cultural power. That our anachronistic laws may be incapable of treating such a complex entity should not detract us from thwarting its ambitions.
These are not mutually exclusive positions. History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric. The real question, then, is whether there is anything truly exceptional about Google’s principles, goals, and methods that would help it avoid this fate.
IS GOOGLE’S EXCEPTIONALISM genuine? On the surface, the answer seems self-evident. The company’s collegial working environment, its idealistic belief that corporations can make money without dirtying their hands, its quixotic quest to organize all of the world’s information, its founders’ contempt for marketing and conventional advertising— everything about the company screams, “We are special!” What normal company warns investors—on the very day of its initial public offering!—that it is willing to “forgo some short-term gains” in order to do “good things for the world”?
As Google’s ambitions multiply, however, its exceptionalism can no longer be taken for granted. Two new books shed light on this issue. Steven Levy had unrivaled access to Google’s executives, and In the Plex is a colorful journalistic account of the company’s history. Levy’s basic premise is that Google is both special and crucial, while the battle for its future is also a battle for the future of the Internet. As Levy puts it, “To understand this pioneering company and its people is to grasp our technological destiny.” What the German poet Friedrich Hebbel said of nineteenth-century Austria—that it is “a little world where the big one holds its tryouts”—also applies to Google. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book is a far more intellectually ambitious project that seeks to document the company’s ecological footprint on the public sphere. Unlike Levy, Vaidhyanathan seeks to place Google’s meteoric rise and exceptionalism in the proper historical, cultural, and regulatory contexts, and suggests public alternatives to some of Google’s ambitious projects.
Even though both writers share the initial premise that, to quote Vaidhyanathan, Google is “nothing like anything we have seen before,” they provide different explanations of Google’s uniqueness. Levy opts for a “great man of history” approach and emphasizes the idealism and the quirkiness of its two founders. The obvious limitation of Levy’s method is that he pays very little attention to the broader intellectual context—the ongoing scholarly debates about the best approaches to information retrieval and the utility (and feasibility) of artificial intelligence—that must have shaped Google’s founders far more than the Montessori schooling system that so excites him.
Vaidhyanathan, while arguing that Google is “such a new phenomenon that old metaphors and precedents don’t fit the challenges the company presents to competitors and users,” posits that its power is mostly a function of recent developments in the information industry as well as of various market and public failures that occurred in the last few decades. Quoting the Marxist theorist David Harvey, Vaidhyanathan argues that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the resulting euphoria over “the end of history” and the triumph of neoliberalism has made the “notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.” Moreover, the growing penetration of market solutions into sectors that were traditionally managed by public institutions—from fighting wars to managing prisons and from schooling to health care—has made Google’s forays into digitizing books appear quite normal, set against the dismal state of public libraries and the continued sell-out of higher education to the highest corporate bidder. Thus Vaidhyanathan arrives at a rather odd and untenable conclusion: that Google is indeed exceptional—but its exceptionalism has little to do with Google.
Google’s two founders appear to firmly believe in their own exceptionalism. They are bold enough to think that the laws of sociology and organizational theory—for example, that most institutions, no matter how creative, are likely to end up in the “iron cage” of highly rationalized bureaucracy—do not apply to Google. This belief runs so deep that for a while they tried to run the company without middle managers—with disastrous results. Google’s embarrassing bouts of corporate autism—those increasingly frequent moments when the company is revealed to be out of touch with the outside world—stem precisely from this odd refusal to acknowledge its own normality. Time and again, its engineers fail to anticipate the loud public outcry over the privacy flaws in its products, not because they lack the technical knowledge to patch the related problems but because they have a hard time imagining an outside world where Google is seen as just another greedy corporation that might have incentives to behave unethically.
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July 13, 2011
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
By Steven Levy
The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
By Siva Vaidhyanathan
I.
For cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists alike, the advent of Google marks off two very distinct periods in Internet history. The optimists remember the age before Google as chaotic, inefficient, and disorganized. Most search engines at the time had poor ethics (some made money by misrepresenting ads as search results) and terrible algorithms (some could not even find their parent companies online). All of that changed when two Stanford graduate students invented an ingenious way to rank Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. Other innovations spurred by Google—especially its novel platform for selling highly targeted ads—have created a new “ecosystem” (the optimists’ favorite buzzword) for producing and disseminating information. Thanks to Google, publishers of all stripes—from novice bloggers in New Delhi to media mandarins in New York—could cash in on their online popularity.
Cyber-pessimists see things quite differently. They wax nostalgic for the early days of the Web when discovery was random, and even fun. They complain that Google has destroyed the joy of serendipitous Web surfing, while its much-celebrated ecosystem is just a toxic wasteland of info-junk. Worse, it’s being constantly polluted by a contingent of “content farms” that produce trivial tidbits of information in order to receive a hefty advertising paycheck from the Googleplex. The skeptics charge that the company treats information as a commodity, trivializing the written word and seeking to turn access to knowledge into a dubious profit-center. Worst of all, Google’s sprawling technology may have created a digital panopticon, making privacy obsolete.
Both camps like to stress that Google is a unique enterprise that stands apart from the rest of Silicon Valley. The optimists do this to convince the public that the company’s motives are benign. If only we could bring ourselves to trust Google, their logic goes, its bright young engineers would deliver us the revolutionary services that we could never expect from our governments. The pessimists make a more intriguing case: for them, the company is so new, sly, and fluid, and the threats that it poses to society are so invisible, insidious, and monumental, that regulators may not yet have the proper analytical models to understand its true market and cultural power. That our anachronistic laws may be incapable of treating such a complex entity should not detract us from thwarting its ambitions.
These are not mutually exclusive positions. History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric. The real question, then, is whether there is anything truly exceptional about Google’s principles, goals, and methods that would help it avoid this fate.
IS GOOGLE’S EXCEPTIONALISM genuine? On the surface, the answer seems self-evident. The company’s collegial working environment, its idealistic belief that corporations can make money without dirtying their hands, its quixotic quest to organize all of the world’s information, its founders’ contempt for marketing and conventional advertising— everything about the company screams, “We are special!” What normal company warns investors—on the very day of its initial public offering!—that it is willing to “forgo some short-term gains” in order to do “good things for the world”?
As Google’s ambitions multiply, however, its exceptionalism can no longer be taken for granted. Two new books shed light on this issue. Steven Levy had unrivaled access to Google’s executives, and In the Plex is a colorful journalistic account of the company’s history. Levy’s basic premise is that Google is both special and crucial, while the battle for its future is also a battle for the future of the Internet. As Levy puts it, “To understand this pioneering company and its people is to grasp our technological destiny.” What the German poet Friedrich Hebbel said of nineteenth-century Austria—that it is “a little world where the big one holds its tryouts”—also applies to Google. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book is a far more intellectually ambitious project that seeks to document the company’s ecological footprint on the public sphere. Unlike Levy, Vaidhyanathan seeks to place Google’s meteoric rise and exceptionalism in the proper historical, cultural, and regulatory contexts, and suggests public alternatives to some of Google’s ambitious projects.
Even though both writers share the initial premise that, to quote Vaidhyanathan, Google is “nothing like anything we have seen before,” they provide different explanations of Google’s uniqueness. Levy opts for a “great man of history” approach and emphasizes the idealism and the quirkiness of its two founders. The obvious limitation of Levy’s method is that he pays very little attention to the broader intellectual context—the ongoing scholarly debates about the best approaches to information retrieval and the utility (and feasibility) of artificial intelligence—that must have shaped Google’s founders far more than the Montessori schooling system that so excites him.
Vaidhyanathan, while arguing that Google is “such a new phenomenon that old metaphors and precedents don’t fit the challenges the company presents to competitors and users,” posits that its power is mostly a function of recent developments in the information industry as well as of various market and public failures that occurred in the last few decades. Quoting the Marxist theorist David Harvey, Vaidhyanathan argues that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the resulting euphoria over “the end of history” and the triumph of neoliberalism has made the “notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.” Moreover, the growing penetration of market solutions into sectors that were traditionally managed by public institutions—from fighting wars to managing prisons and from schooling to health care—has made Google’s forays into digitizing books appear quite normal, set against the dismal state of public libraries and the continued sell-out of higher education to the highest corporate bidder. Thus Vaidhyanathan arrives at a rather odd and untenable conclusion: that Google is indeed exceptional—but its exceptionalism has little to do with Google.
Google’s two founders appear to firmly believe in their own exceptionalism. They are bold enough to think that the laws of sociology and organizational theory—for example, that most institutions, no matter how creative, are likely to end up in the “iron cage” of highly rationalized bureaucracy—do not apply to Google. This belief runs so deep that for a while they tried to run the company without middle managers—with disastrous results. Google’s embarrassing bouts of corporate autism—those increasingly frequent moments when the company is revealed to be out of touch with the outside world—stem precisely from this odd refusal to acknowledge its own normality. Time and again, its engineers fail to anticipate the loud public outcry over the privacy flaws in its products, not because they lack the technical knowledge to patch the related problems but because they have a hard time imagining an outside world where Google is seen as just another greedy corporation that might have incentives to behave unethically.
Read more:
Smile, You're On Everyone's Camera
by Farhad ManjooAccording to the Wall Street Journal, police departments across the nation will soon adopt handheld facial-recognition systems that will let them identify people with a snapshot. These new capabilities are made possible by BI2 Technologies, a Massachusetts company that has developed a small device that attaches to officers' iPhones. The police departments who spoke to the Journal said they plan to use the device only when officers suspect criminal activity and have no other way to identify a person—for instance, when they stop a driver who isn't carrying her license. Law enforcement officials also seemed wary about civil liberties concerns. Is snapping someone's photo from five feet away considered a search? Courts haven't decided the issue, but sheriffs who spoke to the paper say they plan to exercise caution.
Don't believe it. Soon, face recognition will be ubiquitous. While the police may promise to tread lightly, the technology is likely to become so good, so quickly that officers will find themselves reaching for their cameras in all kinds of situations. The police will still likely use traditional ID technologies like fingerprinting—or even iris scanning—as these are generally more accurate than face-scanning, but face-scanning has an obvious advantage over fingerprints: It works from far away. Bunch of guys loitering on the corner? Scantily clad woman hanging around that run-down motel? Two dudes who look like they're smoking a funny-looking cigarette? Why not snap them all just to make sure they're on the up-and-up?
Sure, this isn't a new worry. Early in 2001, police scanned the faces of people going to the Super Bowl, and officials rolled out the technology at Logan Airport in Boston after 9/11. Those efforts raised a stink, and the authorities decided to pull back. But society has changed profoundly in the last decade, and face recognition is now set to go mainstream. What's more, the police may be the least of your worries. In the coming years—if not months—we'll see a slew of apps that allow your friends and neighbors to snap your face and get your name and other information you've put online. This isn't a theoretical worry; the technology exists, now, to do this sort of thing crudely, and the only thing stopping companies from deploying it widely is a fear of public outcry. That fear won't last long. Face recognition for everyone is coming. Get used to it.
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Thursday, July 14, 2011
Why Not the Worst?
by Gene Weingarten
We promised to find the armpit of America. Turns out it's only about five inches from the heart.
My little puddle jumper begins its descent into Elko, a charmless city of 20,000 in the northern Nevada desert. Eighteen seats, all filled. This is not because Elko is a hot tourist attraction; it is because almost everyone else onboard belongs to a mariachi band. These guys have identical shiny blue suits and shiny blue shirts and shiny blue ties and shiny blue-black hair, like Rex Morgan in the comics, and they seem embarrassed to have accepted a gig in a place as tacky as Elko.Compared with my final destination, Elko is Florence during the Italian Renaissance.
When I tell the Elko rental car agent where I am headed, she laughs. Elkonians, who proudly sponsor a yearly civic event called the "Man-Mule Race," consider their neighbor 70 miles west to be an absolute clodhoppy riot.
"Don't sneeze," snorts the rental car woman, "or you'll miss it."
Yeah, I know. I went to Battle Mountain five weeks before, to see if it was dreadful enough to be anointed, officially, "The Armpit of America." I was exorbitantly convinced.
That first visit was in late August. This second one is in early October. In the interim, Everything Changed. With the nation united in mourning and at war, with the Stars and Stripes aflutter in places large and small, slick and hicky, the idea of poking fun at any one part of us became a great deal less funny. The zeitgeist had shifted. Snide was out.
I had to go back, to rethink things.
The road to Battle Mountain is flatter than any cliche -- even pancakes have a certain doughy topology. On this route, there is nothing. No curves. No trees. It is desert, but it is lacking any desert-type beauty. No cacti. No tumbleweeds. None of those spooky cow skulls. The only flora consists of nondescript scrub that resembles acre upon acre of toilet brushes buried to the hilt.
You know you have arrived at Battle Mountain because the town has marked its identity on a nearby hill in enormous letters fashioned from whitewashed rock.
I have returned to this place to find in it not America's armpit, but America's heart. I am here to mine the good in it, to tell the world that Battle Mountain doesn't stink. That is my new challenge.
I hang a right off the highway at the base of the hill, which proudly proclaims, in giant letters:
BM
Man. This is not going to be easy.
Take a small town, remove any trace of history, character, or charm. Allow nothing with any redeeming qualities within city limits -- this includes food, motel beds, service personnel. Then place this pathetic assemblage of ghastly buildings and nasty people on a freeway in the midst of a harsh, uninviting wilderness, far enough from the nearest city to be inconvenient, but not so far for it to develop a character of its own. You now have created Battle Mountain, Nevada.
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Hands-on with Spotify
by Donald Bell You know something is good when it feels illegal. Such is the case with Spotify, the on-demand music-streaming service that seems too good to be true--or certainly, too good to be free. Yet, here it is, the "celestial jukebox" we've been dreaming of since the days of illegally gorging on the original Napster. It's called Spotify, it's finally available in the U.S., and music fans have reason to cheer.
What it does
What Spotify does is so simple and seemingly harmless, it's actually a sad comment on humanity that it counts as a groundbreaking product. As a first-time user, you install the free Spotify Mac/PC application, open it up, and watch as it automatically imports your music collection and playlists from iTunes and other music software and presents you with landing page filled with new releases, top lists, and music shared by your friends. The big trick, though, is a little search box at the top of the screen that lets you search for any reasonably popular artist, song, or album in existence and stream it immediately. You can't get The Beatles, but we had no problem finding greats like The Rolling Stones and David Bowie, as well as obscure indies such as The Ghastly Ones or Four Tet.
Put simply, you tell your computer what you want to hear, and it plays it for you...for free, and without limitations for up to 60 days. It doesn't play something similar to the song you want (like Pandora), or a 30- to 60-second clip of the song you want (like iTunes)--it plays you the whole song or album, just as if it were in your personal music collection.
Of course, there are a few other bells and whistles that make Spotify its own special thing. Facebook and Twitter integration allows you to easily share music discoveries with friends. Artist pages encourage discovery with bio pages and links out to similar artists and top hits of the decade to add context. Without any friction preventing you from jumping from one great song to the next, Spotify also provides a play queue off to the side, allowing you to stash your discoveries without interrupting the currently playing song.
And let's not forget the small but not insignificant matter of style. Spotify's polished, iTunes-like interface is as inviting to music fans as a well-stocked record bin. Each portion of the bento boxlike layout can be resized, and playback, volume, and track scrubber controls are placed neatly across the bottom. Browserlike back and forward buttons located to the left of the search box allow you to dig your way back out out of the rabbit's hole of music discovery.
The catch
Spotify's music service is uniquely generous, but it's not without limitations. Using the free version of the service, full songs can be streamed on-demand an unlimited amount for up to six months (with the occasional audio ad popping into rotation, similar to Pandora). After that time, free users can only play a given track a maximum of five times per month and are also subject to a cap of 10 hours of streaming per month. If you can cough up $5 per month, those restrictions (and ads) disappear, but you're still limited to only listening from your computer. At $10 per month, you can use Spotify on mobile devices (including iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7), and even cache your favorite music and playlists for offline listening.
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