Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Mobile Phone Novels
[ed. I found this excerpt in an article this morning and thought about a post I made a while back. So, I'm reposting the article for those who might have missed it. Here's the excerpt:
"On a much larger scale, this is the same mentality that drives the Japanese "mobile phone novel" phenomenon, keitai shoushetsu. All the rage in Japan and China, stories and books written via cellphones are huge business, according to Wired UK: "The largest mobile phone novel site, Maho i-Land, features more than a million titles and is visited 3.5 billion times each month. In 2007, five out of the 10 best selling novels in Japan were originally mobile phone novels." This popularity has spurred Movellas, a Dutch company, to set up a similar model in Europe with its eyes on English-speaking markets. CEO Joram Felbert equates the books to diary entries." via:]
"On a much larger scale, this is the same mentality that drives the Japanese "mobile phone novel" phenomenon, keitai shoushetsu. All the rage in Japan and China, stories and books written via cellphones are huge business, according to Wired UK: "The largest mobile phone novel site, Maho i-Land, features more than a million titles and is visited 3.5 billion times each month. In 2007, five out of the 10 best selling novels in Japan were originally mobile phone novels." This popularity has spurred Movellas, a Dutch company, to set up a similar model in Europe with its eyes on English-speaking markets. CEO Joram Felbert equates the books to diary entries." via:]
"Sunday Morning"
by Barry Yourgrau
It’s Sunday morning. A dog wakes me up. I hear it barking under the window, I open the window and yell at it. The lady who owns the dog is gardening. She shouts at me to quit yelling at her dog. I shout at her, so knock off the noise!, and slam down the window.
I go downstairs later, it’s quiet, she is sitting in her kitchen. She’s crying. Her breasts are exposed. I feel guilty (because I actually like the dog) and lustful too, at the way she sits there, bent so intimately over a cup of tea. Inspired, I get down on all fours and bounce into her kitchen, barking “Bow wow! Bow wow!” The lady keeps on crying, she doesn’t want to smile but I can see the corners of her mouth begin to turn up. I crawl under her chair and turn over on my back and wag my tail. That does it, she’s really grinning now, and I get up behind her and slide my hands down over her breasts, they have the dark, spongy feel of soil.
“I’m sorry,” she sniffles, about her tears, “it’s all because—”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her, understanding everything. “I’ll help you repot them this afternoon.”
via:
photo credit and more:
My $10,000 Storage Unit Mistake
by Amy Gutman
Earlier this year, I cleared out a storage locker jammed with the accumulated overflow of almost two adult decades -- along with some boxes of college books tossed in for good measure. This was actually my second storage locker, the successor to the Manhattan mini-storage unit that I acquired to insert some breathing space in the Upper West Side one-bedroom I rented shortly after law school. It was intended as a temporary measure, a momentary regrouping. But eight years later, when I finally packed up, the unit was still mine.
This past April, another full decade later, I watched with anxiety as movers unloaded seemingly endless stacks of boxes to the basement of my new home in Northampton, Mass. Would my books have gathered mold? Would my clothing be moth-infested? Would my sturdy law school bicycle even be functional?And in fact, there were some disheartening moments -- a silk dress passed down from my grandmother that had simply disintegrated -- but the main reaction as I unpacked: What a bunch of junk. Here's some of what I found: a desktop computer circa 1989, with its companion dot-matrix printer. A non-working halogen floor lamp. Cartons of music cassette tapes from bands I'd forgotten existed. Boxes of law school textbooks. (And yes, some of them were dusty with mold, but really, who cared?) The list goes on. And on.
It got me thinking about why I'd stashed all this stuff in the first place -- and I had plenty of time to think as I hauled mountains of papers and ancient electronics to the town dump. Over the decades, I'd paid well over $10,000 -- $10,000! -- to stockpile these motley items, an amount far exceeding their value. I couldn't stop imagining other uses for this vanished cash. How had I let this happen? To be sure, I was far from alone in this seeming lunacy. There are 51,000 storage facilities in the United States, more than seven times the number of Starbucks, and one in 10 American households now rents a storage unit, according to a 2009 New York Times Magazine report. But far from reassuring me, this just made the phenomenon seem stranger.
I remember shockingly little of what I learned in law school, but one article from my first-year property class has stayed with me over the years, in particular a quirky yet oddly profound observation that we'd be more distressed to return home and find our living room sofa gone than to learn that the value of our home had dropped by a few percentage points. This is because certain possessions are "self-constitutive." They are intimately bound up with our sense of who we are. "A person cannot be fully a person without a sense of continuity of self over time," wrote University of Michigan law professor Margaret Jane Radin in her seminal article "Property and Personhood." "In order to lead a normal life, there must be some continuity in relating to 'things'."
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An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer
by Denise Grady
A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.
Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.
A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.
There was no trace of it anywhere — no leukemic cells in his blood or bone marrow, no more bulging lymph nodes on his CT scan. His doctors calculated that the treatment had killed off two pounds of cancer cells.
A year later, Mr. Ludwig is still in complete remission. Before, there were days when he could barely get out of bed; now, he plays golf and does yard work.
“I have my life back,” he said.
Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients. The research, they say, has far to go; the treatment is still experimental, not available outside of studies.
But scientists say the treatment that helped Mr. Ludwig, described recently in The New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine, may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer. And not just for leukemia patients: other cancers may also be vulnerable to this novel approach — which employs a disabled form of H.I.V.-1, the virus that causes AIDS, to carry cancer-fighting genes into the patients’ T-cells. In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.
Two other patients have undergone the experimental treatment. One had a partial remission: his disease lessened but did not go away completely. Another had a complete remission. All three had had advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia and had run out of chemotherapy options. Usually, the only hope for a remission in such cases is a bone-marrow transplant, but these patients were not candidates for it.
Dr. Carl June, who led the research and directs translational medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the results stunned even him and his colleagues, Dr. David L. Porter, Bruce Levine and Michael Kalos. They had hoped to see some benefit but had not dared dream of complete, prolonged remissions. Indeed, when Mr. Ludwig began running fevers, the doctors did not realize at first that it was a sign that his T-cells were engaged in a furious battle with his cancer.
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To make T-cells search out and destroy cancer, researchers must equip them to do several tasks: recognize the cancer, attack it, multiply, and live on inside the patient. A number of research groups have been trying to do this, but the T-cells they engineered could not accomplish all the tasks. As a result, the cells’ ability to fight tumors has generally been temporary.
The University of Pennsylvania team seems to have hit all the targets at once. Inside the patients, the T-cells modified by the researchers multiplied to 1,000 to 10,000 times the number infused, wiped out the cancer and then gradually diminished, leaving a population of “memory” cells that can quickly proliferate again if needed.
The researchers said they were not sure which parts of their strategy made it work — special cell-culturing techniques, the use of H.I.V.-1 to carry new genes into the T-cells, or the particular pieces of DNA that they selected to reprogram the T-cells.
Read more:
Monday, September 12, 2011
What Should Food Stamps Subsidize?
by Peter Smith
In the spring of 1961, Alderson Muncy, a miner from West Virginia, traveled 22 miles to a grocery store where the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture awaited his arrival with a television crew and $95 in food stamps. The food allowance would need to cover meals for the jobless man, his wife, and their 13 children for a month. As Muncy loaded up his Jeep for the trip home, The New York Times reported that he had a shopping cart full of groceries “prominently including vanilla wafers and two boxes of cake mix.”
The historic occasion marked the birth of the modern era of food stamps, and provided an early glimpse at the attention devoted to the kinds of food poor people buy with them. To this day, critics contend that the government needs to tighten its grip on the money it doles out. They say poor people make bad choices when left to their own devices, and taxpayer money is better spent buying people just the food they need, not what the food they want. But do food stamps really subsidize junk food? And would adding restrictions on them inspire participants to make healthier purchases?
In the 50 years since President Kennedy expanded the food stamp program, federally-funded foods have become a permanent fixture in the American diet. Now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the program plays a key role in mitigating the United States’ “food insecurity” problem—the estimated 17.2 million Americans who’ve experienced trouble putting food on the table in the last 12 months. If Mr. Muncy were still around today, he’d be one of every six Americans receiving aid, and he’d be allowed to spend it on any food he wanted—anything except pet food, booze, or prepared foods.
As the program’s swelled in recent years, farmers markets and restaurants have jockeyed for a bigger slice of the $65 billion federal food stamp pie. (Currently, they make up only about .01 and .03 percent of SNAP spending, respectively). State and federal officials have worked with nonprofit organizations like Wholesome Wave to get SNAP’s required electronic terminals in the hands of farmers and market managers. Meanwhile, fast food giant Yum! Foods has lobbied to extend benefits to Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, and KFCs across America. The food stamp program was designed on the assumption that food is purchased and prepared at home, and aside from legislation permitting the homeless to make hot meal purchases or the elderly to use meal delivery services, long-standing limits prohibit most people from buying prepared foods with SNAP. Both of these recent efforts could further expand the options to better reflect how Americans actually shop for food today. If adopted, food stamp recipients would be free to choose between farm-fresh corn, corn-syrupy colas, fried chicken, or frou-frou salads at Whole Foods Market.
As KFC’s parent company jostles to dole out its wings to the hungry, nutritionists are arguing that if tobacco and alcohol can be excluded from SNAP on account of their health risks, so should soda and other junk foods. Research generally links enrollment in food assistance programs with a slight increase in obesity, especially among women; one recent study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that food stamp participation correlated with larger waists. Data from 1999-2004 (PDF) suggests that food stamp users spent 40 percent more on soda than other consumers. Food stamps were used to purchase soda and sugar-sweetened beverages an estimated 6 percent of the time. That's half a million gallons of subsidized soda per year. Last October, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to translate these findings into policy when he proposed a two-year ban on using food stamps to buy soda and sugary drinks.
In the spring of 1961, Alderson Muncy, a miner from West Virginia, traveled 22 miles to a grocery store where the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture awaited his arrival with a television crew and $95 in food stamps. The food allowance would need to cover meals for the jobless man, his wife, and their 13 children for a month. As Muncy loaded up his Jeep for the trip home, The New York Times reported that he had a shopping cart full of groceries “prominently including vanilla wafers and two boxes of cake mix.”
The historic occasion marked the birth of the modern era of food stamps, and provided an early glimpse at the attention devoted to the kinds of food poor people buy with them. To this day, critics contend that the government needs to tighten its grip on the money it doles out. They say poor people make bad choices when left to their own devices, and taxpayer money is better spent buying people just the food they need, not what the food they want. But do food stamps really subsidize junk food? And would adding restrictions on them inspire participants to make healthier purchases?In the 50 years since President Kennedy expanded the food stamp program, federally-funded foods have become a permanent fixture in the American diet. Now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the program plays a key role in mitigating the United States’ “food insecurity” problem—the estimated 17.2 million Americans who’ve experienced trouble putting food on the table in the last 12 months. If Mr. Muncy were still around today, he’d be one of every six Americans receiving aid, and he’d be allowed to spend it on any food he wanted—anything except pet food, booze, or prepared foods.
As the program’s swelled in recent years, farmers markets and restaurants have jockeyed for a bigger slice of the $65 billion federal food stamp pie. (Currently, they make up only about .01 and .03 percent of SNAP spending, respectively). State and federal officials have worked with nonprofit organizations like Wholesome Wave to get SNAP’s required electronic terminals in the hands of farmers and market managers. Meanwhile, fast food giant Yum! Foods has lobbied to extend benefits to Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, and KFCs across America. The food stamp program was designed on the assumption that food is purchased and prepared at home, and aside from legislation permitting the homeless to make hot meal purchases or the elderly to use meal delivery services, long-standing limits prohibit most people from buying prepared foods with SNAP. Both of these recent efforts could further expand the options to better reflect how Americans actually shop for food today. If adopted, food stamp recipients would be free to choose between farm-fresh corn, corn-syrupy colas, fried chicken, or frou-frou salads at Whole Foods Market.
As KFC’s parent company jostles to dole out its wings to the hungry, nutritionists are arguing that if tobacco and alcohol can be excluded from SNAP on account of their health risks, so should soda and other junk foods. Research generally links enrollment in food assistance programs with a slight increase in obesity, especially among women; one recent study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that food stamp participation correlated with larger waists. Data from 1999-2004 (PDF) suggests that food stamp users spent 40 percent more on soda than other consumers. Food stamps were used to purchase soda and sugar-sweetened beverages an estimated 6 percent of the time. That's half a million gallons of subsidized soda per year. Last October, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to translate these findings into policy when he proposed a two-year ban on using food stamps to buy soda and sugary drinks.
Copyright Extortion and BitTorrent
by Keegan Hamilton
The bad news arrived in John Doe 2,057's mailbox in May. His wife unsealed a thick envelope from Comcast and read a carefully worded message explaining that a company called Imperial Enterprises, Inc. had filed a lawsuit against him in Washington, D.C., federal court. He stood accused of having illegally downloaded a copyrighted film five months earlier, at precisely 6:03 a.m. on the morning of January 27. The name of the Imperial Enterprises movie he purportedly purloined wasn't mentioned until four pages later. Though printed in tiny italic font in a court filing, it practically leapt off the page: Tokyo Cougar Creampies.
Yet when Mrs. Doe set eyes on that ignominious title, she couldn't help but crack a smile at the absurdity of the situation. Her husband is legally blind, with vision roughly 1/100th of that of a person with normal sight. He is physically incapable of watching any film, this particular porno included."To be honest, it's a little ridiculous," Doe 2,057 says with a rueful chuckle. "My movie-watching ability is nonexistent. My kids watch movies, but they are 4 and 6, so they don't watch porn either. Well, hopefully they don't."
Doe remains adamant that he is innocent. Seated in his Eastside apartment clad in black slacks and a black turtleneck, his eyes visibly disfigured from ocular illness that leaves him living his life in a literal blur, the network-security professional recounts the rookie mistake that got him into this mess.
"I didn't have time to set up the wireless network in my old apartment," he says. "I was working 18-hour days so I just told my wife to go to Best Buy and pick up a router. She installed it, hit next, next, finish, and boom, that was it. We lived in a very upscale building, there was no riffraff. We just assumed we didn't have anything to worry about."
In the following months, Doe says he contacted Comcast on numerous occasions to complain that his Internet connection was frustratingly slow. In hindsight, he believes his neighbors were using his unprotected wireless to download movies. But after researching his options online and consulting an attorney, he realized his predicament was thornier than he'd initially perceived. A simple mea culpa would not suffice.
To fight the case in court would set him back thousands of dollars in attorney's fees. Plus he'd be entangled in litigation in Washington, D.C., while living 2,700 miles away in Washington state. Finally, if he were to lose the case, he could be ordered to pay up to $150,000 under federal copyright law.
But it just so happens that the offices of Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver—the D.C.-based attorneys who represent Imperial Enterprises—offer an easy alternative: Doe can pay a few thousand dollars in fees and the porn case will disappear. In exchange for the settlement, they will drop their lawsuit, and John Doe 2,057 can rest assured that he will remain blissfully anonymous.
He is hardly alone in his predicament: Number 2,057 is one of 3,545 John Does being sued in a mass lawsuit for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of Tokyo Cougar Creampies and/or Teen Paradise 4, another Imperial Enterprises production. This lawsuit isn't unique, either: Since January 2010, 194,345 John Does from across the country have been sued in 296 cases for alleged copyright violations, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital-rights advocacy organization. Virtually all the cases stem from the use of a popular file-sharing technology called BitTorrent, and all are the work of a handful of enterprising attorneys suing on behalf of independent film studios and distributors, purveyors of everything from Academy Award winners like The Hurt Locker to low-budget schlock and hard-core porn.
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In January 2010, Dunlap and Grubb trademarked the name US Copyright Group. Later that month, they filed the first large-scale copyright lawsuit against John Does in U.S. history, subpoenaing information about 749 IP addresses that had allegedly downloaded The Gray Man, a low-budget horror flick about a grandpa who cannibalizes children. Once they had the names and addresses of the presumed pirates, the lawyers mailed them a notice bearing the newly minted, official-looking seal of their US Copyright Group. The message made it clear that the John Does could do things the easy way or the hard way: fork over a settlement or risk getting slapped with a $150,000 judgment in federal court, plus the cost of attorneys' fees.
The tactic was not original. Starting in late 2007, a British law firm began suing thousands of alleged pirates in Europe and squeezing them for settlements. The scheme fell apart when two of the lawyers were convicted of six counts of professional misconduct, including charges that they were "acting in a way likely to diminish trust in the profession" and knowingly targeting innocent victims.
Nevertheless, the US Copyright Group broke new ground in American courts. Over the next five months they proceeded to sue nearly 15,000 John Does in Washington, D.C.—about 9,000 more people than had ever been sued for copyright infringement in all federal courts combined in a single year.
It remains unclear exactly how much cash the pirate hunters have reaped from their John Doe scheme. The settlements are private agreements, and the attorneys are not obligated to divulge their earnings. That being said, it's conceivable that a movie studio and their attorneys could turn a handsome profit on a film without ever selling a single ticket or DVD. In the case of The Expendables, for instance, if even half of the 23,322 John Does involved each doled out a $3,000 settlement, the total haul would have been nearly $35 million.
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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.
via:
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.”
Read more:
“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?
-----
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.”
Read more:
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.
Read more:
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.
Read more:
Sunday, September 11, 2011
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?
---
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*
----
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.
-----
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?
-----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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?
------
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?
-----
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.
-----
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?
-----
Customer: Do you sell ipod chargers?
-----
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?
-----
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.
----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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?
----
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: ...........
---
[Weird Things... #2]
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?---
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*
----
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.
-----
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?
-----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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?
------
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?
-----
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.
-----
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?
-----
Customer: Do you sell ipod chargers?
-----
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?
-----
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.
----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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?
----
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: ...........
---
[Weird Things... #2]
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.
Read more:
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.
Read more:
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.”
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.”
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