Figure in Black Tights,1967, by Jack Beal
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Inundated by a River of Words

by George F. Will, Washington Post

You step onto an airport’s moving walkway, a flat metal conveyor belt that conveys travelers down an airport concourse, sparing them the indignity of burning a few calories by walking a bit. And soon a recorded voice says: “The moving sidewalk is coming to an end. Please look down.”

Well, yes. Pretty much everything does come to an end, doesn’t it? Besides, we can actually see what we already knew — the moving walkway does not go on forever. So, is that announcement about it ending really necessary? Whatever happened to the rule, “Do not speak unless you can improve the silence”?

Passing through a U.S. airport is an immersion in a merciless river of words. They are intended to be helpful, but clearly they flow from an assumption that increasingly animates our government in its transactions with us. The assumption is that we are all infants or imbeciles in need of constant, kindly supervision and nudging, lest we allow ourselves to be flung off a moving walkway and over the edge of the world.

In Denver, underground trains take passengers to and from the ticketing area and departure concourses. As a train arrives, an announcement slightly louder than the noise of the arriving train says: “A train is arriving.” Do tell.

At Kansas City’s airport, a recurring announcement tells travelers: “Designated smoking areas are located outside, away from doors.” That means the designated smoking areas are pretty much the entire Midwest and everything contiguous to it — all of Creation that is “away from” this airport’s doors.

Perhaps some silly warnings are “necessary” to fend off the Fourth Branch of government, a.k.a. trial lawyers. But this merely underscores the fact that all this noise is symptomatic of modern derangements. Solemn warnings about nonexistent risks, and information intended to spare us the slightest responsibility for passing through life with a modicum of attention and intelligence — these express, among other things, an entitlement mentality that the nanny state foments: If something bad or even inconvenient or merely annoying happens to us, even if it results from our foolishness, daydreaming or brooding about the meaning of life, we are entitled to sue someone for restitution.

These minatory pronouncements pouring from public-address systems would drive us mad if we made the mistake of paying attention to them. Fortunately, Americans’ adaptive response to the ubiquity of advertising has caused them to develop mental filters that reduce public pronouncements to audible wallpaper — there but not noticed. Perhaps this is why the Department of Homeland Security no longer bothers to tell travelers it has set the terrorist threat level at burnt umber, or whatever.

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Gamification

by Gabe Zichermann, O'Reilly Radar

Frequently couched either as a question about demographics or as a personal statement ("I don't ever play games"), gamification is dogged by questions of suitability of purpose, appropriateness of context, or even the semantic conflict around the use of the word "games" itself. Whether you fall into the supporter or detractor camp, it's clear that gamification is inspiring debate and raising questions: play vs. work, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, authenticity vs. contrivance, just to name a few.

So perhaps the best place to start addressing these issues is with the basics: what can gamification do, why do we care, and what are its limitations.

Gamification's main purpose is to help people get from point A to point B in their lives — whether that's viewed through the lens of personal growth, societal improvement or marketing engagement. We all have the intrinsic desire to be the best possible people we can be, and to make the world in our image of its maximum potential. However, most of us lack the systems thinking (and discipline) required to get to that goal. What games do well is expose complex, learnable systems that users can engage with to achieve personal mastery — and thus accomplish something aspirational.

Weight Watchers is an example. If you ask someone who has successfully lost weight how he or she did it, they might answer with an emphatic "Weight Watchers!" What they don't say is "diet and exercise," which is actually what they did to lose the weight, regardless of pedagogy. Mastering the system — in this case Weight Watchers' gamey approach of points, levels, challenges, leader boards, etc. — becomes what the user most identifies with as having caused their success.

In this way, creating complex systems that can readily be mastered by users across a span of time produces a unique affinity between player and brand. If successful, it's a lifelong connection that transcends the mere exchange of cash and clicks common to most commercial connections. Good gamification has more in common with other complex systems in the world around us than it does with games, per se.

In tactical terms, gamification can be thought of as using some elements of game systems in the cause of a business objective. It's easiest to identify the trend with experiences (frequent flyer programs, Nike Running/Nike+ or Foursquare) that feel immediately game-like. The presence of key game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, challenges, leader boards, rewards and onboarding, are signals that a game is taking place. Increasingly however, gamification is being used to create experiences that use the power of games without being quite as explicit. In spheres as diverse as HR, healthcare, finance, government and education, companies are pushing the envelope of engaging design with things they learned playing Farmville or World of Warcraft — without trying to build the next Salesforce-branded Angry Birds clone.

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Also:  Gamification Wiki

The Black Cat, 1911, by Gino Severini
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The World at Seven Billion

The world’s population is expected to hit seven billion in the next few weeks. After growing very slowly for most of human history, the number of people on Earth has more than doubled in the last 50 years.

Click below to find out where you fit into this story of human life?

Source:
The World At Seven Billion
BBC, October 26, 2011
h/t:  The Big Picture

From Salami to Soda Pop: What Does “Toxic” Really Mean?

It started out as a crazy stunt — a gag to keep commuters entertained. DJs at KDND-FM Sacramento had lined up 20 volunteers for a water-drinking contest. Whoever drank the most water without urinating would take a Nintendo Wii home as a prize.

Jennifer Strange was 28 and the mother of three children; she’d entered the contest to win the game player for her kids. Several hours into the event, she started to complain about the pain in her head, and by the time it was over, her belly was protruding so badly she looked pregnant. The DJs thought it was funny. She left the station crying, the pain in her head growing worse all the time.

She was found dead that afternoon; poisoned by water.

Ms. Strange’s tragic story illustrates a peculiar fact: even water can be toxic if you drink too much. It seems odd because most of the time, we think of toxicity as clear-cut, a property some things have and others don’t. A widespread belief in popular culture has it the origins of a substance tell you how toxic it will be. If a compound is made by Nature, we assume it must be good for us. If it’s artificial or it has a long unpronounceable name, on the other hand, we assume it must be toxic, and it’s only a matter of time until scientists figure that out.

Alas, the truth is more complicated than popular culture would have you believe. Nature makes poisons more vicious than any chemists can invent. And nearly anything can be toxic if you consume too much.

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Angelique Kidjo, Dave Matthews

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso:  Os galgos (c.1911)
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Adam Martinakis. Electus

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Messengers of Death

Are Drones Creating a New Global Arms Race?

By Andreas Lorenz, Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Gregor Peter Schmitz, Der Spiegle

Plastic tanks and miniature models of fighter jets are on display in Steven Zaloga's home office, and his bookshelves are overflowing with volumes about the history of war. War is Zaloga's area of expertise, but even more than that, it's his business. For 36 years, the historian has analyzed global trends in weapons. He currently works for the Teal Group, a renowned defense consulting firm in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.

Zaloga knows exactly how and where war can be profitable at any given point. And when he discusses which weapons have the best business prospects, he doesn't spare a glance for his models of tanks and fighter jets. Those weapons belong in history books.

The future belongs to drones, remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with sensitive reconnaissance electronics and powerful precision weapons. Drones provide the kind of weapons system strategists have always wished for: They allow a military force to exert power while minimizing its own risks, and to carry out precise, deadly strikes, without sending its own soldiers into danger.

The additional fact that drones are comparatively cheap has made them a favorite with the United States, which has used drone strikes to execute over 2,300 people. Most of these attacks have been carried out as part of the hunt for Taliban members hiding in Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan, and those killed include American-born al-Qaida associate Anwar al-Awlaki, who was executed by one of the remote-controlled weapons without first having been convicted by a court.

A $94 Billion Market?

Zaloga points to a table showing Pentagon budget figures. In 2002, the US military spent around $550 million (€400 million) on drones. In 2011, the figure was nearly $5 billion.

Demand is growing around the world as well. "The Middle East will become an important market for drones," Zaloga believes. "Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. And then Asia, of course: Malaysia, India, Australia. And Europe: Turkey, Italy, Poland, for example."

The analyst estimates global drone sales in the coming decade at $94 billion. Should it so choose, the US has a potential major export success on its hands. The only technological item possibly more popular is the iPhone. A new global " drone arms race" is coming, the New York Times wrote.

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[Click graphic for larger image]

Neko Case

The 20 Best Interiors Blogs

by Gareth Wyn Davies, The Telegraph

Abigail Ahern

Ahern’s white-text-on-black-background blog looks as dramatic as the zeitgeisty interiors that she creates. Like them it is also intimate, with chatty tips (illustrated with lots of arresting pictures) on everything from hanging art to 'zoning’ space, as well as trends and tricks of the trade. abigailahern.wordpress.com

Apartment Therapy

No top 20 would be complete without that behemoth of blogs/forums, Apartment Therapy. Despite its size and reach - and it really is huge, with dizzyingly frequent updates, and posts from around the world - it retains a sense of community. It’s primarily pictorial, with the main feature being House Tours of hipsters’ homes, though it mixes these with practical tips. apartmenttherapy.com

The Beat that My Heart Skipped

'A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations’ reads the sub head. Which roughly translates as 'nirvana for rubberneckers’. The aesthetic is pretty catholic: one day it might be an austerely simple Georgian country house, the next something mid-century modern in the south London suburbs. thebeatthatmy heartskipped.co.uk

Ben Pentreath
It’s not just Ben Pentreath’s interiors shop in Bloomsbury, London, that we’ve fallen in love with; we’re huge fans of his charming blog and even more charming parsonage in Dorset, too. Gratifyingly for nosy types, the parsonage and its enchanting cottage-style garden often crop up in said blog. He’s a cultured so-and-so, is Pentreath, and even his most chatty posts have an erudite but self-deprecating edge. benpentreath.com/inspiration

Bodie and Fou
Karine Candice is a French expat living in London who shares her inspirations, life and all-round creative ingenuity with the world via this blog. Go to the My Home section and sigh at the beauty of her residences (note the plural there). Then click on other links to check out the wonders she’s worked in different rooms - the naff old kitchen cupboards that she has transformed with black paint and a stainless-steel worktop, the charcoal-grey daughter’s nursery, the old pallet turned into a chic (no, really) coffee table. bodieandfou.blogspot.com

Decor8
Decor8 is the name on virtually every other interiors blogger’s blogroll, and with good reason. In six years it’s become such a popular design resource that its American founder, Holly Becker, now has a bestselling spin-off book to her name and is a regular on the lecture circuit. decor8blog.com

Emma’s Designblogg
This Stockholm-based blogger is nothing if not prolific. You could lose yourself for hours in all her archived pages. There aren’t too many words (and those that there are, are English rather than Swedish), just photograph after photograph of beautiful interiors best described as Scandi-rustic. A must for anyone seeking design inspiration or simply to get out of chores. emmas.blogg.se

Famille Summerbelle
If you didn’t know that Julie, the Frenchwoman who blogs (in English) under the name Famille Summerbelle, was a designer of prints, textiles and interiors accessories, you’d guess pretty sharpish. The way that photographs are artfully grouped according to their subjects’ form, pattern or colour is a bit of a giveaway. Fans of the artist Rob Ryan would do well to follow the link on the blog to a shop selling her work. famillesummerbelle.typepad.com

Habitually Chic
'Glamorous Lives & Stylish Places’ is the tagline to this utterly compelling blog from a New York interior designer, a woman of unashamedly uptown taste, both modern, slightly Mad Men uptown and the more traditional. She’ll post photos of everything from the late Jackie O’s swag-tastic Fifth Avenue apartment to her own well-stocked dressing-room. Yes, it’s that fabulous. habituallychic.blogspot.com

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Photo: emmas designblogg

Immunity and Impunity in Elite America

by Glenn Greenwald, Guernica

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding—indeed, an integral part of it.

Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression. This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades.  (...)

The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the trend, but not radically: the top 1 percent of earners in America have been feeding ever more greedily at the trough for decades.

In addition, substantial wealth inequality is so embedded in American political culture that, standing alone, it would not be sufficient to trigger citizen rage of the type we are finally witnessing. The American Founders were clear that they viewed inequality in wealth, power, and prestige as not merely inevitable, but desirable and, for some, even divinely ordained. Jefferson praised “the natural aristocracy” as “the most precious gift of nature” for the “government of society.” John Adams concurred: “It already appears, that there must be in every society of men superiors and inferiors, because God has laid in the… course of nature the foundation of the distinction.”

Not only have the overwhelming majority of Americans long acquiesced to vast income and wealth disparities, but some of those most oppressed by these outcomes have cheered it loudly. Americans have been inculcated not only to accept, but to revere those who are the greatest beneficiaries of this inequality.  (...)
 
This is the mentality that enabled massive growth in income and wealth inequality over the past several decades without much at all in the way of citizen protest. And yet something has indeed changed. It’s not that Americans suddenly woke up one day and decided that substantial income and wealth inequality are themselves unfair or intolerable. What changed was the perception of how that wealth was gotten and so of the ensuing inequality as legitimate.

Many Americans who once accepted or even cheered such inequality now see the gains of the richest as ill-gotten, as undeserved, as cheating. Most of all, the legal system that once served as the legitimizing anchor for outcome inequality, the rule of law—that most basic of American ideals, that a common set of rules are equally applied to all—has now become irrevocably corrupted and is seen as such.

While the Founders accepted outcome inequality, they emphasized—over and over—that its legitimacy hinged on subjecting everyone to the law’s mandates on an equal basis. Jefferson wrote that the essence of America would be that “the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.” Benjamin Franklin warned that creating a privileged legal class would produce “total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections” between rulers and those they ruled. Tom Paine repeatedly railed against “counterfeit nobles,” those whose superior status was grounded not in merit but in unearned legal privilege.

Once it’s obvious that a common set of rules no longer binds all the competitors, the winner will be resented, not heralded.

After all, one of their principal grievances against the British King was his power to exempt his cronies from legal obligations. Almost every Founder repeatedly warned that a failure to apply the law equally to the politically powerful and the rich would ensure a warped and unjust society. In many ways, that was their definition of tyranny.

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Pearl Jam

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A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

by Mona Simpson, NY Times

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

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Photo:  Business Insider

New Dream for Fields

by Ken Belson, NY Times

Mike Dollar had a faraway look as he watched his wife, Laura, hit baseballs to their son, Jesse, who fielded them at shortstop in an Atlanta Braves T-shirt. Abby, their daughter, played catcher. The sun was bright, the sky was clear and the cornstalks were waving in the breeze.

“They really captured the purity of it,” said Dollar, who had driven 900 miles from their home in Georgia so they could frolic here. “This field, we’d hate to see it change.”

Change, it turns out, comes creepingly at the Field of Dreams Movie Site. In the film “Field of Dreams,” a farmer hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield so the ghosts of the disgraced 1919 Chicago White Sox can return to play.

The movie so touched a chord that since its 1989 release, hundreds of thousands of fans have come to this corner of Iowa to run the bases, walk in the cornfields and soak up the feel of the place, which looks much as it did in the film. Retired major leaguers like George Brett, Lou Brock, Catfish Hunter and Kirby Puckett have been here. Politicians on the campaign trail have stopped by. Kevin Costner, a star of the film, returned with his band in 2006.   (...)

But on Sunday, Don and Becky Lansing, the owners of the 193-acre farm that includes the field, are to announce that they are selling their property to an investment group led by a couple from the Chicago area. The group plans to keep the field as it is but also to build a dozen other fields and an indoor center for youth baseball and softball tournaments.

For the Lansings, who have no children, it is a bittersweet transaction. The property has been in the family for more than a century, and Don grew up in the two-bedroom house featured in the movie. The couple tended the grounds, gave tours and sold souvenirs. They spurned offers to commercialize the site and tried to maintain their privacy even as each year 65,000 visitors from around the world pulled into their driveway.  (...)

The Field of Dreams has become a tourist attraction in the most unassuming way. Other than its Web site and a few brochures, it is barely promoted. No billboards alert drivers to turn off the highway; only a few signs point the way to the farm. The Lansings placed a donation box near the guest book at the backstop. Shirts and other souvenirs are for sale, but there are no neon signs or corporate come-ons. The site is closed in the evenings and in the winter.

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Photos: Mark Hirsch for The New York Times, and Joe Scherrman/DreamCatcher Productions LLC

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