We Refuse to Live in Fear

by Glenn Greenwald

President Obama, in his weekend radio address to the nation:

They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.

ABC News, yesterday:

Fighter planes were scrambled, bomb squads were called, FBI command centers went on alert and police teams raced to airports today, but in the end two separate airline incidents were caused by apparently innocent bathroom breaks and a little "making out," federal officials said.

Earlier this year, the Obama White House reversed the Attorney General's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for his alleged crimes in a federal court in New York, and Congress prohibited Guantanamo detainees generally from being tried on U.S. soil, due to fears that the Terrorists would use their heat-vision to melt their shackles and escape or would summon their Terrorist friends to attack the courthouse and free them into the community -- even though none of that has ever happened, and even though almost every other country on the planet that suffered similar Terrorist attacks (Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia) tried the perpetrators in their regular courts in the cities where the attacks occurred. In 2009, President Obama demanded the power to abolish the most basic right -- not to be imprisoned without having been convicted of a crime -- by "preventively detaining" people who, in his words, "cannot be prosecuted yet pose a clear danger." During the Bush years, The Washington Post quoted a military official warning Americans that the most extreme security measures are needed against Guantanamo detainees because these are "people who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down."

Meanwhile, America continues to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to a private Security State industry -- for the most ludicrous security systems -- to turn itself into what Kevin Drum last week called "Fortress America." Drum quoted from Bob Schieffer's book in which the CBS News host recounts how "the Pentagon, like most of official Washington, was still open to the public in the 1970s.…No one was required to show identification to enter the building, nor were security passes required." But now, writes Drum:

Ordinary office buildings require IDs before they'll let you in. Taking pictures is a suspicious activity. Airplanes return to the gate because someone in seat 34A got scared of a guy in a turban a couple of rows in front of them. Small children are swabbed down for bomb residue. . . . .

Now compare Schieffer's recollection with this passage from Wednesday's New York Times feature, "Fortress D.C.":

________________________

"Some things are obvious: the Capitol Hill police armed with assault rifles, standing on the Capitol steps; concrete barricades blocking the once-grand entrances to other federal buildings; the surface-to-air missile battery protecting the White House; the National Archives security guards, almost as old as the Declaration of Independence enshrined inside, slowly waving a magnetic wand over all who enter. But most of the post-9/11 security measures have simply been embedded in the landscape and culture of the nation's capital.

"From the reflecting pool at the foot of the Capitol to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, government cameras take pictures of citizens, who smile for Big Brother and snap their own pictures of the government cameras. In the $561 million underground Capitol visitors center, completed in 2008, people clutching gallery passes from a senator's or representative's office are funneled through magnetometers, to witness a secure Congress in its sealed chambers." . . . .

________________________

The protective apparatus we've put in place, both the less visible surveillance state and the highly visible security state, will be with us forever. And they'll get worse and worse: If the past decade is any judge, Americans seem willing to put up with an almost unlimited amount of this stuff as long as it's done in the name of protecting us from terrorism. The only thing that's provoked any serious reaction at all has been backscatter scanners in airports -- and not because they represent any kind of real government overreach, but because people have a knee-jerk revulsion to the idea of having "nude" pictures of themselves taken.

That gets us upset. But hundreds of billions of dollars spent to relentlessly harden the routines of our daily lives? Our apparent attitude toward that, to paraphrase our former president, is "bring it on."

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Jackson Pollock,  Convergence, 1952 

“A shock trooper of modern painting… The heavyweight of Abstract Expressionism”
     Time Magazine

Although Pollock created some of the most highly valued works of art in the 20th-century, he lived most of his life in poverty. And despite his fame, toward the end of his life Pollock was bitter that his critical success had never translated into wealth, or even financial stability.

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Narrative Science

by Steve Lohr

“Wisconsin appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, “The quality of the narrative produced was quite good,” as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of “the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.”

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

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The Narrative Science software can make inferences based on the historical data it collects and the sequence and outcomes of past games. To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science, the software learns concepts for articles like “individual effort,” “team effort,” “come from behind,” “back and forth,” “season high,” “player’s streak” and “rankings for team.” Then the software decides what element is most important for that game, and it becomes the lead of the article, he said. The data also determines vocabulary selection. A lopsided score may well be termed a “rout” rather than a “win.”

“Composition is the key concept,” Mr. Hammond says. “This is not just taking data and spilling it over into text.”

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Chart: Average American Annual Diet

by Derek Thompson

What do you call 200 pounds of meat, 31 pounds of cheese, 16 pounds of fish, and 415 pounds of veggies? Just a year in the life of the American stomach. Graphic via Sarah Kliff. Full size here.
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Bubble Boys

by Christopher Beam

Feross Aboukhadijeh likes to tell the story of how he got famous. It happened last fall, as he was beginning his junior year at Stanford. Google had just unveiled a feature called Google Instant, which shows search results in real time, as you type. “I thought it was kind of gimmicky,” says Feross. But it gave him an idea: If Google could pop out instant search results, why couldn’t YouTube produce instant videos? He bet a friend he could slap something together in an hour. “I lost the bet,” he says. “It took me three hours.”

The result was YouTube Instant, a site that lets you flip through YouTube videos in real time. Say you type in the letter A: The top video that begins with that letter—currently the music video for Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”—starts playing. Add a B to spell “Ab,” and you see a stop-animation set to the alphabet song. “Abd” gives you the trailer for the Taylor Lautner thriller Abduction. And so on.

YouTube Instant went live at 9:32 p.m. on a Thursday. When Feross woke up at eight the next morning, he had a bunch of missed calls. One of his transcribed voice-mails said, “interview washington post.” “I was like, Nah, that can’t be right,” he says. By the end of the day, YouTube Instant had tens of thousands of views, Feross’s name and grinning face had appeared on dozens of websites and TV shows, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley had offered him a job over Twitter.

Feross politely declined. He wanted to continue his schoolwork at Stanford, plus he had other projects gestating. But the experience put him in the crosshairs of Silicon Valley’s heavyweights, if he wasn’t there already. He’d just finished a summer working at Facebook, where he and Mark Zuckerberg had hit it off. (Zuckerberg later came to speak to a Stanford class Feross was T.A.-ing and called him out by name.) After YouTube Instant launched, a Google recruiter made it clear its door was always open. “If there’s anyone more heavily recruited, I’d want to know their name,” says Sean Holbert, course adviser for Stanford’s ­computer-science department last year.

Feross wears his celebrity well. He speaks rapidly but exudes calm, like a presenter at a TED conference. “YouTube ­Instant changed my life,” he says. “People don’t talk to me the same way. It’s like I gained twenty ­badass points. Whether I deserved it or not, I don’t know, but I’ll take it.”

YouTube Instant hasn’t changed the world—it hasn’t even made money. But its story describes the template for Silicon Valley these days, which may be a bubble, but it hasn’t popped yet: If you have an idea for an app, do it now. Throw it up online. Find an audience. Worry about quality later. Best-case scenario, you create the next Facebook. Worst-case, you try again. Even then, chances are you’ll get a job offer you can brag about rejecting. Right this minute, Silicon Valley is America’s opposite: House prices are soaring and demand for young talent far outstrips supply. The ongoing cyberspace race between Facebook, Apple, and Google, among others, means computer engineers enjoy more freedom—and power—than ever before. The barriers to entry for web programming are almost nonexistent. Angel investors are blessing start-ups left and right, and launching a software company is cheaper than ever. Do I take the offer from Google, or take the venture capital to start my own thing? Only in this one little quadrant do people have the luxury to ask such questions. For ­Feross, the son of a schoolteacher and a Syrian-born electrical engineer, the forecast is bright, though indistinct. He may become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs; he may not. But while most of the country is in economic darkness, the American Dream is beaming bright in Palo Alto.

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Amy Winehouse

Weird Things People Say In Bookshops

by Jen Campbell

I love our customers, I really do. But some days we get some strange people in our shop. Here are some gems I'd like to share.

Customer:: Hi... erm... are you a library?
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Customer: Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?
Me: Er... do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?
Customer: No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.
Me: .....*headdesk*
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Customer: Hi, I'd like to return this book, please.
Me: Do you have the receipt?
Customer: Here.
Me: Erm, you bought this book at Waterstone's.
Customer: Yes.
Me:.... we're not Waterstone's.
Customer: But, you're a bookshop.
Me: Yes, but we're not Waterstone's.
Customer: You're all part of the same chain.
Me: No, sorry, we're an independent bookshop.
Customer: ....
Me: Put it this way, you wouldn't buy clothes in H&M and take them back to Zara, would you?
Customer: Well, no, because they're different shops.
Me: Exactly.
Customer:... I'd like to speak to your manager.
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Person: Hi, I'm looking for a Mr. Patrick.
Me: No one of that name works here, sorry.
Person: But does he live here?
Me:... no one lives here; we're a bookshop.
Person: Are you sure?
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on the phone
Me: Hello Ripping Yarns.
Customer: Do you have any mohair wool?
Me: Sorry, we're not a yarns shop, we're a bookshop.
Customer: You're called Ripping Yarns.
Me: Yes, that's 'yarns' as in stories.
Customer: Well it's a stupid name.
Me: It's a Monty Python reference.
Customer: So you don't sell wool?
Me: No.
Customer: Hmf. Ridiculous.
Me: ...but we do sell dead parrots.
Customer: What?
Me: Parrots. Dead. Extinct. Expired. Would you like one?
Customer: Erm, no.
Me: Ok, well if you change your mind, do call back.
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Customer: Hi, if I buy a book, read it, and bring it back, could I exchange it for another book?
Me: No... because then we wouldn't make any money.
Customer: Oh.
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Me: Ok, so with postage that brings your total to £13.05. One second and I'll get the card machine."
Customer: No. No, absolutely not. I demand that you charge me £12.99. I will not pay for anything that starts with thirteen. You're trying to give me bad luck. Now, change it or I will go to a bookshop who doesn't want me to fall down a hole and die. Ok?
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Pizza Delivery Man [entering the shop with a large pile of pizzas and seeing me, the only person in the bookshop]: Hi, did you order fifteen pizzas?
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Me: Hello, Ripping Yarns Bookshop
Man: Hello, is that Ripping Yarns?
Me: Yes, it is.
Man: Are you there?
Me: How do you mean?
Man: I mean, are you at the shop now?
Me: Erm... yes, you just rang the number for the bookshop and I answered.
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Customer: Hello, I'd like a copy of 'The Water Babies,' with nice illustrations. But I don't want to pay a lot of money for it, so could you show me what editions you do have so I can look at them, and then I can go and find one online?
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Customer: Do you sell ipod chargers?
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Man: Hi, I've just self-published my art book. My friends tell me that I'm the new Van Gogh. How many copies of my book would you like to order?
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Woman: Hi, my daughter is going to come by on her way home from school to buy a book. But she seems to buy books with sex in them and she's only twelve, so can I ask you to keep an eye out for her and make sure she doesn't buy anything inappropriate for her age? I can give you a list of authors she's allowed to buy.
Me: With all due respect, would it not be easier for you to come in with your daughter?
Woman: Certainly not. She's a grown girl, she can do it herself.
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Customer: Do you have any books on the dark arts?
Me: ...No.
Customer: Do you have any idea where I could find some?
Me: Why don't you try Knockturn Alley?
Customer: Where's that?
Me: Oh, the centre of London.
Customer: Thanks, I'll keep my eyes peeled for it.
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Customer: I'm just going to nip to Tesco to do the weekly shop. I'm just going to leave my sons here, is that ok? They're three and five. They're no bother.
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Customer: I read a book in the eighties. I don't remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?
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Man: Do you have black and white film posters?
Me: Yes, we do, over here.
Man: Do you have any posters of Adolf Hitler?
Me: Pardon?
Man: Adolf Hitler.
Me: Well, he wasn't a film star, was he.
Man: Yes, he was. He was American. Jewish, I think.
Me: ...........
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[Weird Things... #2]

[Weird Things #3]

[Weird Things #4]

[Weird Things #5]

[Weird Things #6]
[Weird Things #7]

[Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops... THE BOOK]

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Why We Can Never Escape Our Siblings

by Mandy Van Devin

Sometimes a family tragedy can expose bonds you didn't know existed. That's what happened with my younger sister and me. Although just 11 months apart, we could not have been more different: I rebelled as hard as she conformed, and if you met us at a party ... well, that would never have happened, because we never went to the same parties. If we hadn't been forced to spend summers together with our dad after our parents' divorce, my sister and I would have spent scarcely any time together at all. Then my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer and given less than a year to live. Suddenly, for the first time in our lives, my sister and I were not only inseparable but totally in sync.

Some patterns came naturally, since they were holdovers from when we were kids. Negotiating household chores was a breeze. I agreed to wash the dishes if she would dry and put them away. The next night, we swapped duties. Other moments of synchronicity caught us by surprise, like realizing we both avoid dealing with our emotions by taking on more responsibility. During the nine months my mother fought a losing battle for her life, she found joy in watching her daughters put aside their childhood differences and learn to appreciate each other as adults.

In "The Sibling Effect," science writer Jeffrey Kluger argues that the relationships we have with our siblings are the most important ones of our lives. From the time we gain a brother or sister, they can be both our fiercest competitors and closest confidantes. They teach us the social skills we carry for life and stand by us during our best and worst experiences -- divorce, the birth of children and our parents' deaths. In his book, Kluger uses the latest scientific findings to explain the meaning of everything from birth order to the stigma of the only child.

Salon spoke to Kluger about the enduring loyalty of siblings, why treating children the same is a bad idea, and the problem with being the middle child.

When you were researching the book, were you surprised by how intense the sibling relationship is?

The relationships I have with my siblings have always been very important in my life, but it wasn’t until 2005 that I began reading a lot of papers on the topic. The value and centrality of sibling relationships across the board was surprising to me, particularly because a lot of these dynamics are very deeply encoded. So many of the sibling dynamics we find in the home are replicated in the natural, non-human world, and so much of what I found is universal across several hundreds of species. When you get up to humans, we’ve embroidered and built on these dynamics in all kinds of elaborate ways, but human sibling relationships are deeply rooted into the evolutionary chain.

Is this why you make a strong case for people staying close to their siblings?

One of the reasons I made that case is that there is a real uniqueness to sibling relationships that people never fully appreciated before. Siblings are the only relatives, and perhaps the only people you’ll ever know, who are with you through the entire arc of your life. Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form. Assuming you all reach a ripe old age, they’ll be with you until the very end, and for that reason, there is an intimacy and a familiarity that can’t possibly be available to you in any other relationship throughout your life. Certainly, people can get along without siblings. Single children do, and there are people who have irreparably estranged relationships with their siblings who live full and satisfying lives, but to have siblings and not make the most of that resource is squandering one of the greatest interpersonal resources you’ll ever have.

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Terminal Madness

[ed.  It seems like we've been commemorating 9/11 every day for a decade, and what a legacy it has produced:  a burdensome TSA bureaucracy (read below), two wars, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths; normalization of torture; widespread unlawful surveillance; an assault on the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments; Homeland inSecurity; Guantanamo; Black Sites; a hemorrhaging economy, staggering war-profiteering; an annual Pentagon budget exceeding $680 billion, the list goes on and on.  On a more fundamental level we've institutionalized and normalized fear and anxiety of terrorists, of Muslims and Arabs, of illegal immigrants, of porous borders, of color-coded threat charts, of nail clippers and shampoo bottles; and polarized the country's politics and citizenry into raging incoherence.  I can hardly wait for the next decade.]

by Patrick Smith

In America and across much of the world, the security enhancements put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic and of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational and pointless. The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. It’s the second variety, unfortunately, that have come to dominate the air travel experience, wasting our time and money and humiliating millions of flyers on a daily basis. Nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd.

There are two fundamental flaws in our approach:

The first is a strategy that looks upon everybody who flies — the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger — as a potential terrorist. That is to say, we’re searching for weapons rather than specific people who might actually use them. This is an impossible, unsustainable task in a nation where some two million people travel by air each day. I’ll remind you that tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the idea of TSA guards trying to root out every conceivable weapon at an overcrowded airport.

The second and related fundamental flaw is our foolish, lingering preoccupation with the tactics used by the terrorists on September 11th. To better understand, we need to revisit that Tuesday morning, and grasp exactly what it was that the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; had boxcutters been on the contraband list, the men would have smuggled something else or fashioned their weapons from items on board. It didn’t matter. The success of their plan relied not on weaponry but on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

For a number of reasons, most notably the awareness of passengers and crew, just the opposite is now true. Before the first of the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise, and the boxcutters that went with it, were no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over. Hijackers today would face a planeload of frightened people ready to fight back, and thus an unaffordable probability of failure. The September 11th scheme is kaput.

In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again — guards pawing through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors and screwdrivers. Not to mention, even a child knows that a deadly weapon can be fashioned from virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a broken first class dinner plate.

The folly is much the same with respect to the restrictions on liquids and gels, put in place following the break-up of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate, and “unfortunate.”

On Campus, It’s One Big Commercial

by Natasha Singer

It's move-in day here at the University of North Carolina, and Leila Ismail, stuffed animals in tow, is feeling some freshman angst.

A few friendly upperclassmen spring into action.

But wait: there is something odd, or at least oddly corporate, about this welcome wagon. These U.N.C. students are all wearing identical T-shirts from American Eagle Outfitters.

Turns out three of them are working for that youth clothing chain on this late August morning, as what are known in the trade as “brand ambassadors” or “campus evangelists” — and they have recruited several dozen friends as a volunteer move-in crew. Even before Ms. Ismail can find her dorm or meet her roommate, they cheerily unload her family’s car. Then they lug her belongings to her dorm. Along the way, they dole out American Eagle coupons, American Eagle water canisters and American Eagle pens.

Ms. Ismail, 18, of Charlotte, welcomes the help. “I’ll probably always remember it,” she says.

American Eagle Outfitters certainly hopes so, as do a growing number of companies that are hiring college students to represent brands on campuses across the nation.

This fall, an estimated 10,000 American college students will be working on hundreds of campuses — for cash, swag, job experience or all three — marketing everything from Red Bull to Hewlett-Packard PCs. For the companies hiring them, the motivation is clear: college students spent about $36 billion on things like clothing, computers and cellphones during the 2010-11 school year alone, according to projections from Re:Fuel, a media and promotions firm specializing in the youth market. And who knows the students at, say, U.N.C., better than the students at U.N.C.?

Corporations have been pitching college students for decades on products from cars to credit cards. But what is happening on campuses today is without rival, in terms of commercializing everyday college life.

Companies from Microsoft on down are increasingly seeking out the big men and women on campus to influence their peers. The students most in demand are those who are popular — ones involved in athletics, music, fraternities or sororities. Thousands of Facebook friends help, too. What companies want are students with inside knowledge of school traditions and campus hotspots. In short, they want students with the cred to make brands seem cool, in ways that a TV or magazine ad never could.
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It’s a good deal for the student marketers, who can earn several hundred to several thousand dollars a semester in salary, perks, products and services, depending on the company. But the trend poses challenges for university officials, especially at a time when many schools are themselves embracing corporate sponsorships to help stage events for students.

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Bipartisanship

[ed.  Interesting analysis of political cooperation these days.]

The GOP's One-Sided War on Dems

by Michael Tomasky

As we begin the countdown toward an eventual vote on the jobs bill Barack Obama laid out Thursday night, the question is how much bipartisan support the president can really expect. Democrats and liberals, of course, complain that Republicans have been unusually uniform in their opposition to Obama’s major proposals. Conservatives sometimes rejoin that Democrats were just as firmly opposed to George W. Bush’s major plans. Centrists of the “both sides do it” school of political analysis are dedicated to the proposition that the partisan intensity of both parties is more or less equal.

I thought this might be a good time to look at some numbers and see. So I conducted a little experiment, in which I’ve settled on four signal legislative achievements of each president and studied the roll call votes in each house on those eight measures to see what the numbers tell us.

The four Bush bills I chose: the first tax cut; No Child Left Behind; the Iraq War vote; and the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug bill. The four Obama bills: the stimulus; the health-care vote; the Dodd-Frank financial reform; and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. Other people might have selected others, but these just seemed to me commonsense answers to the question, “What were each president’s top legislative accomplishments?” As a country we spent a heck of a lot of time on these eight issues, so my findings must tell us something. And here’s what they tell us: levels of partisanship are not even remotely close.

Here’s how it all adds up:

            Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5 percent.

            Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8 percent.

            Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1 percent.

            Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8 percent.

            Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7 percent.

            Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75 percent.

Well now. You see, both sides do do it. It just so happens that one side opposes the major proposals of the president from the other party seven times more intensely than the other side does it.

What does this history tell us? It tells us plainly that one side is usually against the other guy, but within bounds that are to be expected, while the other side is blind with rage against the other guy. I wish every American knew this. It would be a start for Democrats to tell them.

Full article here:

A Memory of Webs Past

[ed.  Excerpt from an interesting article describing the massive effort involved in archiving the web.]

by Ariel Bleicher

The task of preserving what's put online has proved, to no one's surprise, monumental. And it's only getting more so as the Internet expands, as Web sites become more dynamic, and as concern grows over online privacy. Increasingly, much of what people put online is being diffused across social networks and distributed through personalized apps on smartphones and tablet computers. The classic Web site, it seems, is already starting to slide toward obsolescence. "I'm convinced the Web as we know it will be gone in a few years' time," Illien says. "What we're doing in this library is trying to capture a trace of it." But to do even that is requiring engineers to build a new, more sophisticated generation of software robots, known as crawlers, to trawl the Web's vast and varied content.

Illien sees himself as a steward of an ancient tradition; he believes he is helping pioneer a revolution in the way society documents what it does and how it thinks. He points out that since the end of the 19th century, the French National Library has been storing sales catalogs from big department stores, including the famous Galeries Lafayette. "Today," he says, "this exceptional collection…is the best record we have of how people dressed back then and who was buying what." One day, he insists, the archives of eBay will be just as valuable. Capturing them, however, is a task that's very different from anything archivists have ever done.

The Web is regularly accessed and modified by as many as 2 billion people, in every country on Earth. It's a wild bazaar of scripting languages, file formats, media players, search interfaces, hidden databases, pay walls, pop-up advertisements, untraceable comments, public broadcasts, private conversations, and applications that can be navigated in an infinite number of ways. Finding and capturing even a substantial portion of it all would require development teams and computing resources as large as, or probably larger than, Google's.

But Google, aside from saving previously indexed pages for caching, has mostly abandoned the Webs of the past—the complete set of Web pages as they existed a month, six months, a year ago, and so on, back to a site's origins. Thus the job of preserving them has fallen to nonprofit foundations and small, overworked teams of engineers and curators at national libraries. Illien, for example, manages a group of nine.

Part of the difficulty in fetching the contents of the Web is that no one really knows how much is out there to be fetched. Brewster Kahle, a U.S. computer engineer who in the late 1980s invented the Wide Area Information Servers, a pre-Web publishing system, paid a visit to AltaVista's offices in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1995. He was shocked to see that the then-popular search engine had indexed 16 million Web pages "on a set of machines that were the size of two large Coke machines," he recalls. "You could actually wrap your arms around the Web."

The apparent compactness of the Web inspired Kahle to found, in San Francisco in 1996, the nonprofit Internet Archive. Wary of infringing on copyrights, AltaVista made sure to delete old pages in its cache. But the Internet Archive, emboldened by its status as a trustworthy nonprofit, was willing to be brazen. "We have an opportunity to one-up the Greeks," Kahle says, referring to the ancient philosophers who collected hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls in the great Library of Alexandria. The invention of the Internet, he argues, has made it possible to create an archive of human knowledge that anyone can access from anywhere on the planet. And Kahle, for one, wasn't going to let a bunch of lawyers talk him out of it.

By March 1997, he had compiled what was arguably the first true time capsule of the global Web. In fact, a substantial portion of the French National Library's electronic archive was simply bought from Kahle's Internet Archive. One of the archive's major successes has been its online access interface, called the Wayback Machine, which lets anyone who knows the address of a Web site see archived versions of its pages. Today the Internet Archive stores more than two petabytes of Web data in a portable Sun Microsystems (now Oracle America) data center built into a shipping container. Back in 1997, Kahle had captured nearly 2 terabytes, which he calculated was about a tenth the amount of text stored in the entire U.S. Library of Congress. It was a substantial collection of the Web of the time, but it wasn't nearly everything.

Kahle knew there were still hundreds of thousands of sites and perhaps millions of "hidden" documents, images, and audio clips that his crawler program missed. It couldn't access password-protected sites, for example, or isolated pages with just a few if any hyperlinks, such as outdated product postings on eBay. More troubling, it couldn't probe "form-fronted" databases, which require typing keywords in search boxes to call up information (such databases include those at the National Climate Data Center in the United States and the British Census). Still, Kahle believed that with the right tools and enough human curators to guide the crawlers, it was possible to get almost all online data. The Web may have been big, but ultimately it was manageable.

That is no longer the case. The part of the Web indexed by search engines such as Google has ballooned from some 50 million unique URLs in 1997 to about 3 trillion today, according to the latest update last November by Majestic SEO, a search optimization service. A URL, or uniform resource locator, designates a single document, such as a JPEG image or an HTML text file. Those files, however, are just a tiny piece of the Internet. By some estimates, the total "surface" Web visible to crawlers is six times the size of the indexed Web, and the "deep" Web of hidden pages and databases is some 500 times larger still.

Counting URLs, though, has become a fairly pointless exercise. For instance, it's possible and increasingly common that a single site is capable of generating vast numbers of unique URLs, all pointing to the same content: advertisements or pornography, typically. Though engineers have devised tricks for steering crawlers away from such spam clusters, even Google's crawlers still from time to time capture billions of unique URLs redirecting to the same place.

"In reality, the Web is infinite in all the wrong ways," laments Julien Masanès, who introduced Web archiving at the French National Library in 2002 and managed the collection until 2004, when he left to start what is now the nonprofit Internet Memory Foundation, headquartered in Amsterdam and Paris.

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Where Fashion Gazes at Itself

[ed.  I use tumblr for most of my art images.  It's an amazing and addictive resource, particularly when using the archive button found on many tumblr blogs.]

by Kayleen Shaefer

When Rich Tong, the fashion director at Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, learned that the model Coco Rocha had started using it, he e-mailed her to say hello.

She later dropped by Tumblr’s Gramercy Park offices in New York, where Mr. Tong introduced her to Jamie Beck, a fashion photographer with her own Tumblr blog, fromme-toyou.tumblr.com. The two set up a photo shoot. Mr. Tong asked Oscar de la Renta, one of the first luxury fashion brands to have a Tumblr, OscarPRGirl.tumblr.com, to provide the gowns.

The resulting photographs, animated images that Ms. Beck calls “cinemagraphs,” featured an elegant Ms. Rocha in her New York apartment flicking her kohl-lined eyes or letting a balcony breeze tousle her hair. They were posted on Ms. Rocha’s blog, oh-so-coco.tumblr.com, reblogged or “liked” about 40,000 times, and viewed countless times by fashion fans around the world.

“For the most part, it’s great having things online,” Ms. Beck, 28, said of the high-fashion shoots she posts using Tumblr. “It can be shared. Ninety percent of my work isn’t a super masterpiece, but if I can reach people who can appreciate it, then it’s successful.”

Tumblr, founded four years ago, has reached out to the fashion community in a way no other social networking site has. For the second time, it has brought users to New York Fashion Week as reporters, paying for their trips and giving them access to the shows. Their coverage is being posted on a dedicated channel, tumblr.com/NYFW, made up of posts from 20 bloggers picked by Tumblr’s staff, along with contributions from magazines that have their own Tumblrs, like Vogue, GQ, T Magazine and Glamour.

Formerly a pileup of profanity-laced teenage ramblings and partly expressed emotions, at least to an outsider’s eye, Tumblr has become an image-driven platform of importance to fashion photographers — like Terry Richardson (who uses it mostly as a diary) — brands and bloggers, who have made it an integral part of their online lives.

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Paul Gauguin, Nave Nave Moe (Sacred Spring, Sweet Dreams), 1894
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