Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Rolling Stones
[ed. Great song...all the better by the contribution of Lisa Fischer, taking over for the unforgettable Mary Clayton.]
Forfeiture Funding
[ed. Forfeiture Fund via: Wikipedia.]
Imagine you own a million-dollar piece of property free and clear, but then the federal government and local law enforcement agents announce that they are going to take it from you, not compensate you one dime, and then use the money they get from selling your land to pad their budgets—all this even though you have never so much as been accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one.
That is the nightmare Russ Caswell and his family is now facing in Tewksbury, Mass., where they stand to lose the family-operated motel they have owned for two generations.
Seeking to circumvent state law and cash in on the profits, the Tewksbury Police Department is working with the U.S. Department of Justice to take and sell the Caswells property because a tiny fraction of people who have stayed at the Motel Caswell during the past 20 years have been arrested for crimes. Keep in mind, the Caswells themselves have worked closely with law enforcement officials to prevent and report crime on their property. And the arrests the government complains of represent less than .0005 percent of the 125,000 rooms the Caswells have rented over that period of time.
Despite all this, the Caswells stand to lose literally everything they have worked for because of this effort by federal and local law enforcement officials not to pursue justice, but rather to police for profit.
How widespread is the problem of civil forfeiture abuse nationwide? In 1986, the year after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund was created—the fund that holds the forfeiture proceeds from properties forfeited under federal law and available to be paid out to law enforcement agencies—took in just $93.7 million. Today it holds more than $1.6 billion.
via:
Imagine you own a million-dollar piece of property free and clear, but then the federal government and local law enforcement agents announce that they are going to take it from you, not compensate you one dime, and then use the money they get from selling your land to pad their budgets—all this even though you have never so much as been accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one. That is the nightmare Russ Caswell and his family is now facing in Tewksbury, Mass., where they stand to lose the family-operated motel they have owned for two generations.
Seeking to circumvent state law and cash in on the profits, the Tewksbury Police Department is working with the U.S. Department of Justice to take and sell the Caswells property because a tiny fraction of people who have stayed at the Motel Caswell during the past 20 years have been arrested for crimes. Keep in mind, the Caswells themselves have worked closely with law enforcement officials to prevent and report crime on their property. And the arrests the government complains of represent less than .0005 percent of the 125,000 rooms the Caswells have rented over that period of time.
Despite all this, the Caswells stand to lose literally everything they have worked for because of this effort by federal and local law enforcement officials not to pursue justice, but rather to police for profit.
How widespread is the problem of civil forfeiture abuse nationwide? In 1986, the year after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund was created—the fund that holds the forfeiture proceeds from properties forfeited under federal law and available to be paid out to law enforcement agencies—took in just $93.7 million. Today it holds more than $1.6 billion.
via:
Blade of Grass
Every year, Nikon hosts the Small World Photomicrography Competition, inviting photographers and scientists to submit images of all things visible under a microscope. The winners for this year's competition have just been announced, with Dr. Igor Siwanowicz taking first prize for his image of a common green lacewing larva that had earlier landed on his hand, trying to take a bite. This year's entries cover a fascinating range of subjects and sizes, from the eyes of a freshwater shrimp to the delicate scales on the wing of a butterfly, from a simple yet complex frost crystal to neurospheres and cancer cells. Enjoy a trip into a miniature world through the images shared here with us by the fine folks at Nikon, all from the 2011 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. [32 photos]
via:
Current Events: "Bank Of America Customers Get The Heck Out Of That Bank!"
[ed. Swipe fees. Aptly named. If you want to skip the introduction explaining what swipe fees are, skip to around 06:00 in the video and you'll still get a pretty good idea of how you're being screwed (if you're a BofA customer, which I won't be shortly).]
Hawaii Makes Surfing Official High School Sport
[ed. About time! Good news.]
by Jaymes Song
Hawaii will soon become the first state in the US to call surfing an official high school sport.
Governor Neil Abercrombie and state education officials said on Monday that riding the waves will join the likes of football, basketball, volleyball and swimming as a state-sanctioned prep sport in public schools, starting as early as spring 2013.
"It's quite clear, when you think of Hawaii, you think of surfing," Abercrombie said with a scenic backdrop of sunbathers and surfers along Waikiki beach behind him. The news conference was held near the statue of island icon Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic gold medal swimmer known as the father of modern surfing.
"Hawaii is the birthplace of surfing. From Duke Kahanamoku to the thousands of residents and visitors who surf both recreationally and competitively, the sport is rooted in our culture and way of life," the governor said.
The Aloha State is known for its world-class surf breaks and competitions. It is home to many pro surfers and has produced several world champions including Hawaii's Carissa Moore, who this summer became the youngest world champion at 18.
"I think it's awesome, and it will open doors for kids," said Moore, who welcomed the announcement. She said the sport taught her many life lessons growing up, such as hard work, perseverance, and time management.
"Surfing and riding a wave is so much like life. You fall down over and over again, but you keep picking yourself back up until you ride one all the way to the beach," Moore said. "I know that's kind of cheesy, but I think surfing is definitely a really good outlet for a lot of teens and young kids. It's a way to channel a lot of energy into something positive. It's just really awesome."
Read more:
Banking’s Self Inflicted Wounds
by Barry Ritholtz
Morgan Stanley in a free fall. Goldman Sachs at multi-year lows. Citigroup looking Ugly. Bank of America off 50% from recent highs.
You may be wondering what is going on with the major firms in the financial sector. While each of these firms have different problems — vampire squids to Countrywide acquisitions — they all have something in common: Their balance sheets are opaque.
This is no accident. Indeed, it was by design that execs in the banking sector, and their outside accountants, hatched a scheme in 2008 to hide their balance sheets from public view. The bankers had been lobbying the Financial Accounting Standards Board to change the rules that governed “Fair Value Measurements” also known as FAS157 (September 2006).
You may recall during 2008 this was referred to as “Mark-to-market” accounting.
Banks loved m2m during a boom period. M2M made the more unusual balance sheet holdings — derivatives, the mortgage-backed securities (MBS), exotic liabilities, and other assets — look fantastic. The fair value measurements of these items — essentially, yesterday’s closing price — allowed the accounts to show enormous profits. Those were the underlying basis for huge bonuses, stock option grants and of course, company share prices.
The reality was quite a bit different. These were not equities or treasuries or corporate bonds — they were thinly traded items whose prices were ramping upwards on a sea of delusional optimism. As soon as the credit bubble ended and housing began to retreat, these assets would free fall like an Acme anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon — and the bankers were the Coyote.
Uh-oh, this was gonna be a problem. So the bankers began to lobby FASB to change the rules governing Fair Value Accounting. Sure, it was hugely helpful on the way up, but now, reporting actual holdings — previously marked at all time highs — was becoming problematic.
To their credit, the accounting board resisted. What Bankers were proposing — marking to their models — was patently absurd. These were the models that told them these purchases were good ideas in the first place. Changing Mark-to-Market to Mark-to-Model was a free pass to practically allowed banks to NEVER have to write down their liabilities. Some people began calling the proposed accounting changes “Mark-to-Make-Believe.”
In the midst of the 2008-09 collapse, however, Congress was in a panic. They mandated that FASB accept Mark-to-Make-Believe accounting in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It gave the Securities and Exchange Commission the authority to “Suspend Mark-to-Market Accounting.” In March and April of 2009, that is precisely what occurred.
It was yet another example of an industry lobbying Washington, D.C. to get precisely what they want — and then having that legislation blow up in their faces. (I detailed other examples of this in a chapter of Bailout Nation — you can see that chapter here: Strange Connections, Unintended Consequences).
The bottom line is this: Investors do not really have a clear idea of how healthy any of these banks truly are. We do not know the state of their balance sheets. We do not know what their exposures are to mortgages, to Europe, to Greece, etc. They could all be technically insolvent, as far as any investor can tell.
And that is exactly how the bankers wanted it.
But given the trouble in Europe, and the likely problems in housing if the US goes into a recession, Investors have decided they cannot take the risk of a holding an opaque, possibly under-capitalized probably over-leveraged financial firm blindly. They are telling the banks no thanks, we are not interested, we are going to be prudent and we have to assume the worst. Hence, for the second half of 2011, they have been selling off their holdings in these opaque, potentially insolvent too big to succeed entities.
Bankers, enjoy your beds. You made them, now lay in them . . .
Morgan Stanley in a free fall. Goldman Sachs at multi-year lows. Citigroup looking Ugly. Bank of America off 50% from recent highs.
You may be wondering what is going on with the major firms in the financial sector. While each of these firms have different problems — vampire squids to Countrywide acquisitions — they all have something in common: Their balance sheets are opaque.
This is no accident. Indeed, it was by design that execs in the banking sector, and their outside accountants, hatched a scheme in 2008 to hide their balance sheets from public view. The bankers had been lobbying the Financial Accounting Standards Board to change the rules that governed “Fair Value Measurements” also known as FAS157 (September 2006).
You may recall during 2008 this was referred to as “Mark-to-market” accounting.
Banks loved m2m during a boom period. M2M made the more unusual balance sheet holdings — derivatives, the mortgage-backed securities (MBS), exotic liabilities, and other assets — look fantastic. The fair value measurements of these items — essentially, yesterday’s closing price — allowed the accounts to show enormous profits. Those were the underlying basis for huge bonuses, stock option grants and of course, company share prices.
The reality was quite a bit different. These were not equities or treasuries or corporate bonds — they were thinly traded items whose prices were ramping upwards on a sea of delusional optimism. As soon as the credit bubble ended and housing began to retreat, these assets would free fall like an Acme anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon — and the bankers were the Coyote.
Uh-oh, this was gonna be a problem. So the bankers began to lobby FASB to change the rules governing Fair Value Accounting. Sure, it was hugely helpful on the way up, but now, reporting actual holdings — previously marked at all time highs — was becoming problematic.
To their credit, the accounting board resisted. What Bankers were proposing — marking to their models — was patently absurd. These were the models that told them these purchases were good ideas in the first place. Changing Mark-to-Market to Mark-to-Model was a free pass to practically allowed banks to NEVER have to write down their liabilities. Some people began calling the proposed accounting changes “Mark-to-Make-Believe.”
In the midst of the 2008-09 collapse, however, Congress was in a panic. They mandated that FASB accept Mark-to-Make-Believe accounting in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It gave the Securities and Exchange Commission the authority to “Suspend Mark-to-Market Accounting.” In March and April of 2009, that is precisely what occurred.
It was yet another example of an industry lobbying Washington, D.C. to get precisely what they want — and then having that legislation blow up in their faces. (I detailed other examples of this in a chapter of Bailout Nation — you can see that chapter here: Strange Connections, Unintended Consequences).
The bottom line is this: Investors do not really have a clear idea of how healthy any of these banks truly are. We do not know the state of their balance sheets. We do not know what their exposures are to mortgages, to Europe, to Greece, etc. They could all be technically insolvent, as far as any investor can tell.
And that is exactly how the bankers wanted it.
But given the trouble in Europe, and the likely problems in housing if the US goes into a recession, Investors have decided they cannot take the risk of a holding an opaque, possibly under-capitalized probably over-leveraged financial firm blindly. They are telling the banks no thanks, we are not interested, we are going to be prudent and we have to assume the worst. Hence, for the second half of 2011, they have been selling off their holdings in these opaque, potentially insolvent too big to succeed entities.
Bankers, enjoy your beds. You made them, now lay in them . . .
Can Answers to Evolution Be Found in Slime?
[ed. ...complex choreography of signals in some species that allows 20,000 individuals to form a single sluglike body, sounds like Congress]
by Carl Zimmer
Most of the aliens that come out of Hollywood don’t really look alien at all. They may have pizza-size eyes or roachlike antennae, but their oddities are draped on a familiar humanoid frame.
If you want to find life forms that truly seem otherworldly, your local forest is a much better place than your local cineplex. It is home to creatures that are immensely old, fundamentally bizarre and capable of startlingly sophisticated behavior. They are the slime molds.
Slime molds are a remarkable lineage of amoebas that live in soil. While they spend part of their life as ordinary single-celled creatures, they sometimes grow into truly alien forms. Some species gather by the thousands to form multicellular bodies that can crawl. Others develop into gigantic, pulsating networks of protoplasm.
While naturalists have known of slime molds for centuries, only now are scientists really starting to understand them. Lab experiments are revealing the complex choreography of signals in some species that allows 20,000 individuals to form a single sluglike body.
The pulsating networks that some slime molds form are giving other scientists clues to solving difficult mathematical problems. In 2000, Japanese researchers placed Physarum polycephalum — the name means “many-headed slime mold” — in a maze, along with two blocks of food. It extended its tendrils down the corridors of the maze, bending around curves, reaching dead ends and then backing out of them. After four hours, the slime mold was feasting on both blocks of food.
Andrew Adamatzky, a researcher at the University of West England, has been watching slime molds since 2006, finding inspirations in their growth for designing computer software. He has made electronic music using molds, and a favorite hobby is challenging them to build highway systems. In 2010 he and his colleagues placed a slime mold in the middle of a map of Spain and Portugal, with pieces of food on the largest cities. The slime mold grew a network of tentacles that was nearly identical to the actual highway system on the Iberian Peninsula.
“If some countries started to build highways from scratch, I would recommend to them to follow the slime mold routes,” Dr. Adamatzky said.
Read more:
photo:Steven L. Stephenson
Monday, October 3, 2011
Tweet Science
[ed. The race to monitize Twitter and stay ahead of the technological curve.]
by Joe Hagan
At Twitter, they like to measure human events in tweets per second, or TPS. The more tweets per second, the more impressive and important the event—Twitter as the most important measure of human history. The company started releasing this number the summer of 2009, when Michael Jackson died and crashed Twitter’s service under the weight of 493 TPS.
On computer monitors on floor three, they can watch TPS for an event spike like commodities on a trading desk. The freak earthquake in Virginia in August reached 5,500 TPS, a number released to the press as a significant barometer of impact: “More tweets than Osama bin Laden,” said the London Telegraph.
That compares to 5,530 TPS for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Or 6,436 TPS for the 2011 BET Awards, and 5,531 for the NBA Finals. In August, the new Twitter record was set: 8,868 TPS for Beyoncé’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.
“People describe Twitter as a global consciousness,” says Ryan Sarver, a fast-talking engineer who comes out of his third-floor sanctum to meet me in a conference room. Sarver, who is responsible for managing this chaotic flow, the so-called fire hose of tweets, says Twitter has only begun to take shape. “We’re in the early life cycle of what the platform is,” he says. “This is version one.”
In Silicon Valley, Twitter is already legend, one of those once-a-decade sure things, on the level of Microsoft or Apple or Google or Facebook—that not only changes the nature of the world but eventually makes it hard to remember a world in which it didn’t exist. The ambition, and some of the rhetoric, is Gutenberg-size, though instead of Bibles, there’s Beyoncé.
“There are nearly 7 billion people on this planet,” says Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and original genius. “And we are building Twitter for all of them. They evolve, and so do we.”
Measured by the number of people who’ve joined the flock, Twitter’s growth is indeed staggering—a 370 percent surge in users since 2009. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as Google a decade ago, and everyone here, along with the small army of venture capitalists whose millions are funding this laboratory, is aware of this fact, as well as the implied competition with social-media superstars like Facebook and Zynga that are promising to go public and make lots of Valley V.C.’s very rich. Google has launched an assault with Google+, a more controlled social world, equidistant from Facebook and Twitter, and thus a possible refuge for those who are disaffected by Twitter’s chaotic news flow.
The intense pressure to convert Twitter into a profitable business, and before a tech bubble pops, is palpable here. And it’s happening as the company struggles with an interlocked set of existential questions, starting with the most basic one possible: What is Twitter? Initially, the idea was of a kind of adrenalized Facebook, with friends communicating with friends in short bursts—and indeed, Facebook rushed to borrow Twitter’s innovations so it wouldn’t be left behind. But as Twitter grew, it finally became clear to Twitter’s brain trust that the relevant analogy was not a social network but a broadcast system—the birth of a different sort of TV.
Read more:
llustration by Christoph Niemann
by Joe Hagan
At Twitter, they like to measure human events in tweets per second, or TPS. The more tweets per second, the more impressive and important the event—Twitter as the most important measure of human history. The company started releasing this number the summer of 2009, when Michael Jackson died and crashed Twitter’s service under the weight of 493 TPS. On computer monitors on floor three, they can watch TPS for an event spike like commodities on a trading desk. The freak earthquake in Virginia in August reached 5,500 TPS, a number released to the press as a significant barometer of impact: “More tweets than Osama bin Laden,” said the London Telegraph.
That compares to 5,530 TPS for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Or 6,436 TPS for the 2011 BET Awards, and 5,531 for the NBA Finals. In August, the new Twitter record was set: 8,868 TPS for Beyoncé’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.
“People describe Twitter as a global consciousness,” says Ryan Sarver, a fast-talking engineer who comes out of his third-floor sanctum to meet me in a conference room. Sarver, who is responsible for managing this chaotic flow, the so-called fire hose of tweets, says Twitter has only begun to take shape. “We’re in the early life cycle of what the platform is,” he says. “This is version one.”
In Silicon Valley, Twitter is already legend, one of those once-a-decade sure things, on the level of Microsoft or Apple or Google or Facebook—that not only changes the nature of the world but eventually makes it hard to remember a world in which it didn’t exist. The ambition, and some of the rhetoric, is Gutenberg-size, though instead of Bibles, there’s Beyoncé.
“There are nearly 7 billion people on this planet,” says Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and original genius. “And we are building Twitter for all of them. They evolve, and so do we.”
Measured by the number of people who’ve joined the flock, Twitter’s growth is indeed staggering—a 370 percent surge in users since 2009. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as Google a decade ago, and everyone here, along with the small army of venture capitalists whose millions are funding this laboratory, is aware of this fact, as well as the implied competition with social-media superstars like Facebook and Zynga that are promising to go public and make lots of Valley V.C.’s very rich. Google has launched an assault with Google+, a more controlled social world, equidistant from Facebook and Twitter, and thus a possible refuge for those who are disaffected by Twitter’s chaotic news flow.
The intense pressure to convert Twitter into a profitable business, and before a tech bubble pops, is palpable here. And it’s happening as the company struggles with an interlocked set of existential questions, starting with the most basic one possible: What is Twitter? Initially, the idea was of a kind of adrenalized Facebook, with friends communicating with friends in short bursts—and indeed, Facebook rushed to borrow Twitter’s innovations so it wouldn’t be left behind. But as Twitter grew, it finally became clear to Twitter’s brain trust that the relevant analogy was not a social network but a broadcast system—the birth of a different sort of TV.
Read more:
llustration by Christoph Niemann
Shifting the Suburban Paradigm
by Alison Arieff
Is there anything made in America that’s less innovative than the single-family home? While we obsess over the new in terms of what we keep in our houses — the ever-increasing speed and functionality of our Smartphones, entertainment options built into refrigerators, sophisticated devices that monitor, analyze and report on our sleep cycles, even the superior technology of the running shoes we put on before heading out the flimsy fiberboard door — we’re incredibly undemanding of the houses themselves. These continue to be built the same way they have for over a century, and usually not as well. Walls and windows are thin, materials cheap, design (and I use the term loosely) not well-considered. The building process is a protracted affair, taking far too long and creating embarrassing amounts of building waste (over 50 percent of all waste produced in the United States, in fact).
But the lack of innovation extends beyond the high-tech. Not so long ago homes were designed to make the most of their surrounding climate and terrain. Vernacular forms like the shotgun, in places like New Orleans, served a purpose that went far beyond aesthetics — they encouraged natural cooling by improving cross-ventilation. In Texas and New Mexico, thick adobe walls similarly kept heat in during the winter, and out during the summer. Houses were sited and windows placed to maximize or minimize sun exposure as needed.
No longer. Today, it’s essentially the same floor plan, sheetrock and construction that’s used coast to coast. Glossy brochures with stock images of smiling families advertise “Spanish Gothic” or “Tuscan Villa,” but what’s really on offer is the same dumb box with a stage set of a façade tacked onto the front. The reasons behind the advertised vernacular styles have long since disappeared, their function surrendered to ornament.
It’s not that the means don’t exist for better building. There have been significant advances in homebuilding: smarter, safer, more sustainable materials that contribute to healthier and more energy-efficient structures (less expensive to heat and cool); precision building technologies that reduce construction time and waste; and more enlightened planning principles that recognize the social, economic and health benefits of building homes within denser, more walkable neighborhoods (important as sprawl is associated with high levels of driving, which contributes to air pollution, and air pollution leads to morbidity and mortality).
Why? The reasons are complicated. Incentives received by commercial builders for doing the right thing are not extended to residential builders. But it’s also true that the homebuilding industry isn’t interested in risk or change, despite (in spite of?) dramatic slowdowns in residential construction, an anticipated surplus of thousands of homes, a market besieged by foreclosures and still-dropping home values. Even though there’s increasing demand for more diverse housing — especially smaller, more energy-efficient homes and multifamily units in more walkable communities — too many homebuilders are inexplicably committed to the status quo.
For many in the homebuilding industry, the current scenario is seen not as a call to action but as a temporary problem of the market (I found the same thing to be true in the world of shopping-center builders, who pine for — and fully expect the return of — a go-go consumer culture that is likely gone for good). To address current market realities, they don’t look to innovation but rather to an easier fallback strategy: a new marketing plan.
Five years ago, at the crest of the housing boom, I worked on a team consulting with a master planned-community developer who had asked us to help “revolutionize the way our homes are sold.” The developer had little interest in the work we proposed — namely, to revolutionize the way their homes were designed and built. That company, like most of its competitors, laid off nearly half its work force the following year, and ended or delayed most of its future development projects. Devoting energy to how best to market its inventory hadn’t been the most forward-thinking strategy for them then — nor would it be now.
Read more:
Is there anything made in America that’s less innovative than the single-family home? While we obsess over the new in terms of what we keep in our houses — the ever-increasing speed and functionality of our Smartphones, entertainment options built into refrigerators, sophisticated devices that monitor, analyze and report on our sleep cycles, even the superior technology of the running shoes we put on before heading out the flimsy fiberboard door — we’re incredibly undemanding of the houses themselves. These continue to be built the same way they have for over a century, and usually not as well. Walls and windows are thin, materials cheap, design (and I use the term loosely) not well-considered. The building process is a protracted affair, taking far too long and creating embarrassing amounts of building waste (over 50 percent of all waste produced in the United States, in fact).But the lack of innovation extends beyond the high-tech. Not so long ago homes were designed to make the most of their surrounding climate and terrain. Vernacular forms like the shotgun, in places like New Orleans, served a purpose that went far beyond aesthetics — they encouraged natural cooling by improving cross-ventilation. In Texas and New Mexico, thick adobe walls similarly kept heat in during the winter, and out during the summer. Houses were sited and windows placed to maximize or minimize sun exposure as needed.
No longer. Today, it’s essentially the same floor plan, sheetrock and construction that’s used coast to coast. Glossy brochures with stock images of smiling families advertise “Spanish Gothic” or “Tuscan Villa,” but what’s really on offer is the same dumb box with a stage set of a façade tacked onto the front. The reasons behind the advertised vernacular styles have long since disappeared, their function surrendered to ornament.
It’s not that the means don’t exist for better building. There have been significant advances in homebuilding: smarter, safer, more sustainable materials that contribute to healthier and more energy-efficient structures (less expensive to heat and cool); precision building technologies that reduce construction time and waste; and more enlightened planning principles that recognize the social, economic and health benefits of building homes within denser, more walkable neighborhoods (important as sprawl is associated with high levels of driving, which contributes to air pollution, and air pollution leads to morbidity and mortality).
Why? The reasons are complicated. Incentives received by commercial builders for doing the right thing are not extended to residential builders. But it’s also true that the homebuilding industry isn’t interested in risk or change, despite (in spite of?) dramatic slowdowns in residential construction, an anticipated surplus of thousands of homes, a market besieged by foreclosures and still-dropping home values. Even though there’s increasing demand for more diverse housing — especially smaller, more energy-efficient homes and multifamily units in more walkable communities — too many homebuilders are inexplicably committed to the status quo.
For many in the homebuilding industry, the current scenario is seen not as a call to action but as a temporary problem of the market (I found the same thing to be true in the world of shopping-center builders, who pine for — and fully expect the return of — a go-go consumer culture that is likely gone for good). To address current market realities, they don’t look to innovation but rather to an easier fallback strategy: a new marketing plan.
Five years ago, at the crest of the housing boom, I worked on a team consulting with a master planned-community developer who had asked us to help “revolutionize the way our homes are sold.” The developer had little interest in the work we proposed — namely, to revolutionize the way their homes were designed and built. That company, like most of its competitors, laid off nearly half its work force the following year, and ended or delayed most of its future development projects. Devoting energy to how best to market its inventory hadn’t been the most forward-thinking strategy for them then — nor would it be now.
Read more:
Sunday, October 2, 2011
TV's Fixation With 'The New Breed' Of '60s Women
[ed. What? I don't watch tv often, so I guess I shouldn't judge. Must be some kind of nostalgia (or yearning) for the good old days when sexual politics were much simpler.]
by NPR Staff
The fall television season is in high gear, and there seems to be a barrage of tight skirts, panty-hosed legs and perfectly made-up faces making their way from the 1960s to the small screen.
On ABC is Pan Am, a show about airline stewardesses. There's also NBC's The Playboy Club, which following the stories of fictional bunnies in Hugh Hefner's nightclub. The networks are hoping to get on the nostalgia bandwagon after the success of Mad Men, AMC's period drama.
Ratings aside, what is it about that era and the women who lived it that has captured our collective imagination?
"It's one of the most glamorous, most beautiful eras in our history, but I also think it was an era of most change for women," Stacey Wilson, senior editor at the Hollywood Reporter, tells Rachel Martin, host of weekends on All things Considered. "And I think that it offers some ripe scenarios for fictional storytelling."
One male character in Pan Am dubs the fleet of stewardesses "a new breed of women." The networks must want viewers to remember that because ABC and NBC have played up their characters as gender pioneers — using their good looks and charm to get by in a man's world.
At times, it might be hard to look beyond the corsets and bunny ears and see a feminist, but Wilson says the formula can serve as a springboard for richer characters.
"Yes, the women are hot; they're in tight clothes," she says, "but I do think it allows for interesting evolution of character when you start with a girl who's kind of confined to this costume."
Wilson says there is something oddly comforting about watching "train-wreck history." She says watching these characters on the front lines of sexism elicits a combination of shock and relief. Network television is able, she says, to show us the uglier parts of our past in a lighthearted way. "I think it really actually affords us appreciation for how good things are now," she says
via:
by NPR Staff
The fall television season is in high gear, and there seems to be a barrage of tight skirts, panty-hosed legs and perfectly made-up faces making their way from the 1960s to the small screen.
On ABC is Pan Am, a show about airline stewardesses. There's also NBC's The Playboy Club, which following the stories of fictional bunnies in Hugh Hefner's nightclub. The networks are hoping to get on the nostalgia bandwagon after the success of Mad Men, AMC's period drama.
Ratings aside, what is it about that era and the women who lived it that has captured our collective imagination?
"It's one of the most glamorous, most beautiful eras in our history, but I also think it was an era of most change for women," Stacey Wilson, senior editor at the Hollywood Reporter, tells Rachel Martin, host of weekends on All things Considered. "And I think that it offers some ripe scenarios for fictional storytelling."
One male character in Pan Am dubs the fleet of stewardesses "a new breed of women." The networks must want viewers to remember that because ABC and NBC have played up their characters as gender pioneers — using their good looks and charm to get by in a man's world.
At times, it might be hard to look beyond the corsets and bunny ears and see a feminist, but Wilson says the formula can serve as a springboard for richer characters.
"Yes, the women are hot; they're in tight clothes," she says, "but I do think it allows for interesting evolution of character when you start with a girl who's kind of confined to this costume."
Wilson says there is something oddly comforting about watching "train-wreck history." She says watching these characters on the front lines of sexism elicits a combination of shock and relief. Network television is able, she says, to show us the uglier parts of our past in a lighthearted way. "I think it really actually affords us appreciation for how good things are now," she says
via:
Brian Eno: Interview
[ed. Fascinating interview with Brian Eno on the essence of creativity in music.]
by David Mitchell
Brian Eno is widely considered one of the great contemporary composers and music producers, famously for his work with U2 and Coldplay, but perhaps most influentially with David Bowie and the Talking Heads. He began his career in 1971, in his early 20s, as a member of the band Roxy Music, then left to make music on his own, including such albums as “Another Green World,” “Music for Airports” and with David Byrne, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” a landmark in the history of sampling.
His fascination with musical technologies and artistic systems led him to popularize the Koan algorithmic music generator, and, with Peter Schmidt, to develop the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards, an intervention into the artistic process. His music is heard, unknowingly, by millions of people every day: he created the start-up sound of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating software. He is a founder of the Long Now Foundation, whose mandate is to educate the public into thinking about the distant future. “Drums Between the Bells” is his latest release.
Excerpts:
But really, the idea arose out of the new possibilities of the medium of recording. I listened with interest to the work of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek and George Martin because I realized that they were doing things with music that could be described as sound painting. For me, trained as a painter, this was exciting: Music was being made like paintings were made, adding and subtracting, manipulating colors, built up over a period of time rather than performed in one sitting. Separated from performance, recorded sound had become a malleable material, like paint or clay. And the results of this process were pointing toward a type of music that was less linear and more immersive: music you lived inside.
I wanted to hear a music that could create an atmosphere that would support your attention but still let you decide where it was directed.
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photo: Wikipedia
by David Mitchell
Brian Eno is widely considered one of the great contemporary composers and music producers, famously for his work with U2 and Coldplay, but perhaps most influentially with David Bowie and the Talking Heads. He began his career in 1971, in his early 20s, as a member of the band Roxy Music, then left to make music on his own, including such albums as “Another Green World,” “Music for Airports” and with David Byrne, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” a landmark in the history of sampling.His fascination with musical technologies and artistic systems led him to popularize the Koan algorithmic music generator, and, with Peter Schmidt, to develop the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards, an intervention into the artistic process. His music is heard, unknowingly, by millions of people every day: he created the start-up sound of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating software. He is a founder of the Long Now Foundation, whose mandate is to educate the public into thinking about the distant future. “Drums Between the Bells” is his latest release.
Excerpts:
But really, the idea arose out of the new possibilities of the medium of recording. I listened with interest to the work of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek and George Martin because I realized that they were doing things with music that could be described as sound painting. For me, trained as a painter, this was exciting: Music was being made like paintings were made, adding and subtracting, manipulating colors, built up over a period of time rather than performed in one sitting. Separated from performance, recorded sound had become a malleable material, like paint or clay. And the results of this process were pointing toward a type of music that was less linear and more immersive: music you lived inside.
***
I remember an early review of one of my ambient records saying something like, “No song, no beat, no melody, no movement” — and they weren’t being complimentary. But I think they were accurate, because this is a music of texture and sonic sensuality more than it is any of those things they were alluding to. I’m sure when the first abstract paintings appeared, people said, “No figure, no structure,” etc … The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.I wanted to hear a music that could create an atmosphere that would support your attention but still let you decide where it was directed.
***
What is interesting to me about music among all the arts is that it is, and always has been, as far as I know, a completely nonfigurative medium. Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting. Even opera, with its strong narrative element, doesn’t depend on the narrative for its effect. So although lots of people still find abstract painting difficult to deal with, they are very happy to listen to music — a much more resolutely abstract form of art. ***
The problem with analyzing music is that there are so many relevant variables. The most complicated is context. When you hear a great moment in a piece of music, how far can you separate it from its context? And how much of its context is relevant: the preceding two bars? The surrounding four bars? The whole piece? What is the context, anyway? Is it your knowledge of how the piece was played? Your understanding of the artist’s other works? Your understanding of the whole genre? I always think that whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to — all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard. So what you are listening to are tiny differences, tiny innovations. Something new is added, something you’ve grown used to is omitted, something you thought you were familiar with sounds different.Read more:
photo: Wikipedia
Burning the Diaries
by Dominique Browning
I just burned 40 years’ worth of diaries. I didn’t plan to — or rather, I had always planned to, once I knew I was dying, or so old that I would soon lack the energy to gather wood. But I woke one morning and knew it was time to let it all go.
I yanked open the flue, started a small log fire and began laying on the books. They burned slowly, at first, reluctant. A few pages caught, charred edges smoldered across my handwriting, plumes of thick smoke funneled lazily into the chimney. Small hard-covered volumes, bound with thread and taped up the side, most of them from an old French stationer, their plasticized glossy lapis blue or turquoise covers shrank and shriveled. I had thought that color would keep away the evil eye. The eye that would pry. The eye that would judge.I didn’t want anyone else reading my diaries, ever.
Diaries are irresistible. And I am an unregenerate snoop. I will read any diary left in my path. I’ve even bent my path toward diaries carelessly left lying around. I know it is horrid of me, but I can’t help it. I’ve even read diaries in other people’s homes, that’s how bad I am (and that’s as close as I’ll come to confessing the most outrageous violation of privacy I ever committed, which turned out to be a life-altering experience — karmic return — and I promised myself I would never, ever do such a thing again).
Privacy was, perhaps, the proximate cause of my recent pyromania. My sons were spending the summer with me, probably the last one at my home. They were on the verge of departing into their own adulthoods, moving into their own first homes. It had struck me, several years earlier, that once children get to a certain age, the age at which they start keeping their own secrets, becoming opaque to those who love them most, the age at which they start doing things they cannot dream of their parents ever having done, they (the children, that is) become voraciously curious about what exactly their parents did do, what were their secrets, who were they, anyway? Once children get curious that way, nothing puts them off the scent.
I should know. I spent years as an adolescent rooting around in my parents’ closets looking for letters, sorting through boxes of letters and photographs, riffling through sock drawers, searching for clues about who they were, how they came together, why on earth I was on earth?
There were plenty of people I wanted to smoke out of my life. Come to think of it, several months earlier, one of them, about whom I had written in my diaries copiously, tearfully, had recently popped unceremoniously back into my life after decades of absence, petulantly demanding to be returned to his pedestal, or at least to my bed. Perhaps a roaring fire would put to rest the Undead.
The urge to burn may have been born, long ago, of the old prayer I said on my knees every night as a child: “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” My soul lived in my diaries, and that weighed on me; by the time I was in my 40s, if I died before I woke, I wanted Someone to snatch my diaries before anyone else did.
I started keeping journals when I was 14. I was compulsive about it. I scribbled daily — and as I went through college, I filled hundreds of pages with dense, colorful ink, going right to the edge, ignoring the light threads of red margin markers, denying paragraphs their breaks, my nib flattening under the pressure of the stream of soul pouring forth. A psychiatrist once told me that I was obviously trying to psychoanalyze myself, which, professionally speaking, is considered impossible. But there certainly was — and has always been — a form of therapy in keeping journals. It is a way of self-soothing, as an adult, a way of rubbing the satin corner of your blankie against your finger when you’re anxious about separation, or too worked up to fall asleep.
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photo: Don Farrall/Getty Images
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