Sunday, June 3, 2012
Gratuities Etiquette; Tipping For Success
To tip or not to tip
Arriving at a hotel room with the member of staff whom has just assisted you in finding the way and also brought your bags, there is a momentary awkward pause as he/she waits for ‘something’. You are still absorbing the luxurious fittings, the view from the window and the contents of the mini-bar. Suddenly you become aware they have not yet left. Slightly embarrassed, you apologetically fumble with your cash, a note is offered, it is accepted, but you are left with the distinct impression that they are unimpressed or equally embarrassed. Was that enough, did you get the exchange rate wrong; maybe you actually gave too much?
It is a scenario all but the most savvy of travellers or thick-skinned of us are painfully familiar with, and questions we have often asked ourselves. What is correct gratuities etiquette and how much to tip and when is the right moment to do so? Of course all situations are different; your baggage may have been transported to the room by way of a golf buggy and therefore you may not feel so inclined to provide as much as to the poor young man who carried all your baggage single-handedly up three flights of stairs because the lift was not working!
There is also often a gulf in culture and wealth, both of which can provide a variety of expectations of the gratuity that a hospitality industry worker may expect. Tipping in the United States is almost customary and it is common practice to see American tourists paying small gratuities for almost every service that they receive wherever they travel.
The various cultures throughout Europe have their own customs for providing tips, often dependant on whether it is also common practice for establishments to include a ‘service charge’ within the bill. There was even a television campaign for a well known high street bank in the United Kingdom which inferred that tipping within Iceland was actually considered insulting. However the truth is whilst a tip is never expected as it is usually included in the bill I doubt it is ever refused! Japan however, where gratuities are seldom given, the offer of a tip may cause a degree of embarrassment, confusion and even offence.
Gratuitous gratitude
In some countries, including Egypt (baksheesh), Morocco and even parts of Turkey (bahşiş) tipping is almost de rigueur, and even the tiniest ‘service’ will result in a proffered hand. Examples of this may include showing you the ‘very best’ spot to get your photograph, or just opening a door to see inside a room. It is always a good idea to carry some small denomination coinage around with you for when you feel such a service genuinely warrants a small payment. A word of advice though, if in Egypt do not ever hand your camera to anybody to take a photograph of you, you may have to pay to get it back! (...)
The level of service received and the circumstances of the visit will obviously affect the size of the gratuity. A one off visit to a restaurant where a good meal and excellent service resulted in an extremely pleasant evening will hopefully be rewarded accordingly. Poor service will usually result in little or no tip at all! However a favourite restaurant that you visit regularly and where you have a rapport with the staff will often mean they receive better tips, this encourages better service, you keep returning and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle.
More difficult to judge is the method and size of gratuity that is effective when staying for a week or more at a hotel or resort hotel. It is likely that you will be served by many different staff, chamber maids, bar, waiting and reception staff, pool attendants and concierges, all of which will expect a little remuneration for their services. This is often where some travellers falter, providing a tip for every little act of hospitality they receive. This can work out extremely expensive and may even prove slightly offensive to the receiver as it can be misconceived that their benefactor is actually ‘showing off’ their affluence. (...)
A tipping strategy
It is important to assess the particular person that you are dealing with, how often are they likely to be ‘servicing’ your needs. A chamber maid, waiter at breakfast or pool attendant is likely to deal with you regularly, but the waitress in the expensive a la carte restaurant may only see you once or twice. Upset the wrong member of the team and it could prove costly in terms of your comfort especially as it is likely they will communicate their displeasure with other hotel staff! A horses head in your bed is probably unlikely, but the hospitality industry is awash with stories how of staff have avenged their grievance with guests.
It is appropriate to provide a small, but reasonable tip to staff which are unlikely to be in contact with you often throughout your stay. However those that will be attending to your needs on a daily basis require a more well thought out tipping strategy. I suggest a sensible initial sum is offered to them at the earliest opportunity, hopefully your first encounter with them. Make it perfectly clear that they will get a further tip before you leave if you feel you have been well looked after. This will usually ensure that they work especially hard to keep you happy and will often ask if you have any special requirements. Your room will be well serviced each day and you will often be given the best table available when you arrive for a meal.
by Iain Mallory, Mallory on Travel | Read more:
The Right Chemistry
O.K., let's cut out all this nonsense about romantic love. Let's bring some scientific precision to the party. Let's put love under a microscope.
When rigorous people with Ph.D.s after their names do that, what they see is not some silly, senseless thing. No, their probe reveals that love rests firmly on the foundations of evolution, biology and chemistry. What seems on the surface to be irrational, intoxicated behavior is in fact part of nature's master strategy -- a vital force that has helped humans survive, thrive and multiply through thousands of years. Says Michael Mills, a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles: "Love is our ancestors whispering in our ears." (...)
Lovers often claim that they feel as if they are being swept away. They're not mistaken; they are literally flooded by chemicals, research suggests. A meeting of eyes, a touch of hands or a whiff of scent sets off a flood that starts in the brain and races along the nerves and through the blood. The results are familiar: flushed skin, sweaty palms, heavy breathing. If love looks suspiciously like stress, the reason is simple: the chemical pathways are identical.
Above all, there is the sheer euphoria of falling in love -- a not-so- surprising reaction, considering that many of the substances swamping the newly smitten are chemical cousins of amphetamines. They include dopamine, norepinephrine and especially phenylethylamine (PEA). Cole Porter knew what he was talking about when he wrote "I get a kick out of you." "Love is a natural high," observes Anthony Walsh, author of The Science of Love: Understanding Love and Its Effects on Mind and Body. "PEA gives you that silly smile that you flash at strangers. When we meet someone who is attractive to us, the whistle blows at the PEA factory."
But phenylethylamine highs don't last forever, a fact that lends support to arguments that passionate romantic love is short-lived. As with any amphetamine, the body builds up a tolerance to PEA; thus it takes more and more of the substance to produce love's special kick. After two to three years, the body simply can't crank up the needed amount of PEA. And chewing on chocolate doesn't help, despite popular belief. The candy is high in PEA, but it fails to boost the body's supply.
Fizzling chemicals spell the end of delirious passion; for many people that marks the end of the liaison as well. It is particularly true for those whom Dr. Michael Liebowitz of the New York State Psychiatric Institute terms "attraction junkies." They crave the intoxication of falling in love so much that they move frantically from affair to affair just as soon as the first rush of infatuation fades.
Still, many romances clearly endure beyond the first years. What accounts for that? Another set of chemicals, of course. The continued presence of a partner gradually steps up production in the brain of endorphins. Unlike the fizzy amphetamines, these are soothing substances. Natural pain-killers, they give lovers a sense of security, peace and calm. "That is one reason why it feels so horrible when we're abandoned or a lover dies," notes Fisher. "We don't have our daily hit of narcotics."
Researchers see a contrast between the heated infatuation induced by PEA, along with other amphetamine-like chemicals, and the more intimate attachment fostered and prolonged by endorphins. "Early love is when you love the way the other person makes you feel," explains psychiatrist Mark Goulston of the University of California, Los Angeles. "Mature love is when you love the person as he or she is." It is the difference between passionate and compassionate love, observes Walsh, a psychobiologist at Boise State University in Idaho. "It's Bon Jovi vs. Beethoven." (...)
A certain smile, a certain face
-- Johnny Mathis
Chemicals may help explain (at least to scientists) the feelings of passion and compassion, but why do people tend to fall in love with one partner rather than a myriad of others? Once again, it's partly a function of evolution and biology. "Men are looking for maximal fertility in a mate," says Loyola Marymount's Mills. "That is in large part why females in the prime childbearing ages of 17 to 28 are so desirable." Men can size up youth and vitality in a glance, and studies indeed show that men fall in love quite rapidly. Women tumble more slowly, to a large degree because their requirements are more complex; they need more time to check the guy out. "Age is not vital," notes Mills, "but the ability to provide security, father children, share resources and hold a high status in society are all key factors."
Still, that does not explain why the way Mary walks and laughs makes Bill dizzy with desire while Marcia's gait and giggle leave him cold. "Nature has wired us for one special person," suggests Walsh, romantically. He rejects the idea that a woman or a man can be in love with two people at the same time. Each person carries in his or her mind a unique subliminal guide to the ideal partner, a "love map," to borrow a term coined by sexologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University.
Drawn from the people and experiences of childhood, the map is a record of whatever we found enticing and exciting -- or disturbing and disgusting. Small feet, curly hair. The way our mothers patted our head or how our fathers told a joke. A fireman's uniform, a doctor's stethoscope. All the information gathered while growing up is imprinted in the brain's circuitry by adolescence. Partners never meet each and every requirement, but a sufficient number of matches can light up the wires and signal, "It's love." Not every partner will be like the last one, since lovers may have different combinations of the characteristics favored by the map.
by Anastasia Toufexis, Time | Read more:
Image via:
The Economic Costs of Fear
The S&P stock index now yields a 7% real (inflation-adjusted) return. By contrast, the annual real interest rate on the five-year United States Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) is -1.02%. Yes, there is a “minus” sign in front of that: if you buy the five-year TIPS, each year over the next five years the US Treasury will pay you in interest the past year’s consumer inflation rate minus 1.02%. Even the annual real interest rate on the 30-year TIPS is only 0.63% – and you run a large risk that its value will decline at some point over the next generation, implying a big loss if you need to sell it before maturity.
So, imagine that you invest $10,000 in the S&P index. This year, your share of the profits made by those companies will be $700. Now, imagine that, of that total, the companies pay out $250 in dividends (which you reinvest to buy more stock) and retain $450 in earnings to reinvest in their businesses. If the companies’ managers do their job, that reinvestment will boost the value of your shares to $10,450. Add to that the $250 of newly-bought shares, and next year the portfolio will be worth $10,700 – more if stock-market valuations rise, and less if they fall.
In fact, over any past period long enough for waves of optimism and pessimism to cancel each other out, the average earnings yield on the S&P index has been a good guide to the return on the portfolio. So, if you invest $10,000 in the S&P for the next five years, you can reasonably expect (with enormous upside and downside risks) to make about 7% per year, leaving you with a compounded profit in inflation-adjusted dollars of $4,191. If you invest $10,000 in the five-year TIPS, you can confidently expect a five-year loss of $510.
That is an extraordinary gap in the returns that you can reasonably expect. It naturally raises the question: why aren’t people moving their money from TIPS (and US Treasury bonds and other safe assets) to stocks (and other relatively risky assets)?
People have different reasons. And many people’s thinking is not terribly coherent. But there appear to be two main explanations.
by Brad DeLong, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Illustration by Paul Lachine
In fact, over any past period long enough for waves of optimism and pessimism to cancel each other out, the average earnings yield on the S&P index has been a good guide to the return on the portfolio. So, if you invest $10,000 in the S&P for the next five years, you can reasonably expect (with enormous upside and downside risks) to make about 7% per year, leaving you with a compounded profit in inflation-adjusted dollars of $4,191. If you invest $10,000 in the five-year TIPS, you can confidently expect a five-year loss of $510.
That is an extraordinary gap in the returns that you can reasonably expect. It naturally raises the question: why aren’t people moving their money from TIPS (and US Treasury bonds and other safe assets) to stocks (and other relatively risky assets)?
People have different reasons. And many people’s thinking is not terribly coherent. But there appear to be two main explanations.
by Brad DeLong, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Illustration by Paul Lachine
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Is the Web Closing?
Within the tech community, there is much angst about whether the Web is about to be “closed.” Will it be controlled by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, or will it remain “open” to all? Will individuals be able to reach any content they choose? Will developers be able to serve users on any platform?
These questions are not new. Fifteen years ago, in the United States at least, it was America Online (now AOL) that was closing the Internet. Millions of people were relying on it for Internet service and content. Today, AOL’s purported control of the Internet looks like a joke, but it was considered a real threat at the time.
The threats nowadays come from both new companies and new models. (More about governments some other time!) Facebook is getting a lot of press, owing to its omnipresence and its pending stock offering. Increasingly, many people go online to use Facebook and little else, while Facebook encourages people to stay on Facebook to play games on Zynga, shop through Facebook commerce pages, and so on. Will Facebook control who gets to talk to us?
Likewise, Apple not only sells hardware; it controls, through its AppStore, what applications we can use on our iPads and iPhones. Amazon determines which books we read. Google, for its part, is filtering our search results – both by focusing our attention on what also interests our friends, and by excluding Twitter and Facebook results from what we see (mostly because Google and Facebook/Twitter cannot agree on whether Google should pay them or they should pay Google).
Beyond these big players, smaller startups are increasingly focusing on apps – applications that capture a user and keep him or her safe from the open Web. These apps are typically cleared and registered by big players. For many people, Apple’s App Store is a benefit, because it ensures (for the most part) the quality and security of the apps. Various app stores perform the same function for Android phones, but with fewer restrictions and less security.
In short, you can choose from along a spectrum, with more security at one end and more freedom at the other. The Web’s openness or closure is not a matter to be settled once and for all, but rather a fluctuating situation (even if the Web takes on some other name). CompuServe and FTP (file transfer protocol, remember that?) were not the end of Internet history. The same is true of the World Wide Web. Nor will Google or Facebook and apps be the last word of the digital age.
The great thing about Internet companies is that they, unlike governments, can be relatively easily deposed. They cannot outlaw competition, and, though they can engage in anti-competitive practices and filter content for their users, eventually consumers and startups fight back.
by Esther Dyson, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Illustration by Pedro Molina
These questions are not new. Fifteen years ago, in the United States at least, it was America Online (now AOL) that was closing the Internet. Millions of people were relying on it for Internet service and content. Today, AOL’s purported control of the Internet looks like a joke, but it was considered a real threat at the time.
The threats nowadays come from both new companies and new models. (More about governments some other time!) Facebook is getting a lot of press, owing to its omnipresence and its pending stock offering. Increasingly, many people go online to use Facebook and little else, while Facebook encourages people to stay on Facebook to play games on Zynga, shop through Facebook commerce pages, and so on. Will Facebook control who gets to talk to us?Likewise, Apple not only sells hardware; it controls, through its AppStore, what applications we can use on our iPads and iPhones. Amazon determines which books we read. Google, for its part, is filtering our search results – both by focusing our attention on what also interests our friends, and by excluding Twitter and Facebook results from what we see (mostly because Google and Facebook/Twitter cannot agree on whether Google should pay them or they should pay Google).
Beyond these big players, smaller startups are increasingly focusing on apps – applications that capture a user and keep him or her safe from the open Web. These apps are typically cleared and registered by big players. For many people, Apple’s App Store is a benefit, because it ensures (for the most part) the quality and security of the apps. Various app stores perform the same function for Android phones, but with fewer restrictions and less security.
In short, you can choose from along a spectrum, with more security at one end and more freedom at the other. The Web’s openness or closure is not a matter to be settled once and for all, but rather a fluctuating situation (even if the Web takes on some other name). CompuServe and FTP (file transfer protocol, remember that?) were not the end of Internet history. The same is true of the World Wide Web. Nor will Google or Facebook and apps be the last word of the digital age.
The great thing about Internet companies is that they, unlike governments, can be relatively easily deposed. They cannot outlaw competition, and, though they can engage in anti-competitive practices and filter content for their users, eventually consumers and startups fight back.
by Esther Dyson, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Illustration by Pedro Molina
Is It Art? Increasingly, That's a Judicial Decision
When did judges become the ultimate arbiters of art?
Hardly a month goes by without a court being asked to settle a dispute over the nature of artistic meaning, expression or authenticity. These are the big-think questions that confound philosophers, art critics and artists themselves. But judges are regularly obliged to take on these questions—and their answers have huge consequences for what can and cannot be attempted by artists.
Among the most recent legal tussles is a claim for damages involving one of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings. The conceptual artist made more than a thousand of them before his death in 2007. Which isn't to say he drew or painted all of them. The genius of Mr. LeWitt's Wall Drawings was that they were generally executed by others. He drew up the plan or strategy for each work, with directions—written out on certificates signed by the artist—that were as specific in intent as they were abstract in result.
But the question then arises, what is the work of art? Is it the instructions written out on the signed certificate, or the image rendered according to the instructions? The owner of one LeWitt Wall Drawing is suing a gallery that lost the drawing's certificate. If it comes to determining damages, a judge may have to decide whether the certificate was itself the artwork.
And then there is the continuing litigation over whether Richard Prince's "appropriation" artworks have original meaning or are just copyright-infringing copies of other artists' works.
Or take the litigation over Cady Noland's 1990 work "Cowboys Milking." In February, art dealer Marc Jancou sued Sotheby's and Ms. Noland for $26 million (later adding $20 million more to the claim for damages). The auction house had agreed to sell "Cowboys Milking" for Mr. Jancou, but according to the dealer's court filing, Sotheby's pulled it from the auction at the last moment, at the artist's request. According to the art-industry newsletter Baer Faxt, Ms. Noland had "disavowed" the work.
Can an artist disown a piece long ago sold? And, if so, does the artist have to give a reason? Would it be reason enough if a work were slightly damaged, or if an artist simply no longer liked the work of her salad days? And what then? Does a work cease to be art if the artist renounces it?
This last question, in particular, is the sort of ontological question philosophers make a specialty of noodling. But increasingly these tricky theoreticals about the nature of art are being answered, not by the heirs of Aristotle but by the judiciary. We are in the age of courthouse aesthetics.
by Eric Felten, WSJ | Read more:
Illustration: Alex Nabaum
Hardly a month goes by without a court being asked to settle a dispute over the nature of artistic meaning, expression or authenticity. These are the big-think questions that confound philosophers, art critics and artists themselves. But judges are regularly obliged to take on these questions—and their answers have huge consequences for what can and cannot be attempted by artists.
Among the most recent legal tussles is a claim for damages involving one of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings. The conceptual artist made more than a thousand of them before his death in 2007. Which isn't to say he drew or painted all of them. The genius of Mr. LeWitt's Wall Drawings was that they were generally executed by others. He drew up the plan or strategy for each work, with directions—written out on certificates signed by the artist—that were as specific in intent as they were abstract in result. But the question then arises, what is the work of art? Is it the instructions written out on the signed certificate, or the image rendered according to the instructions? The owner of one LeWitt Wall Drawing is suing a gallery that lost the drawing's certificate. If it comes to determining damages, a judge may have to decide whether the certificate was itself the artwork.
And then there is the continuing litigation over whether Richard Prince's "appropriation" artworks have original meaning or are just copyright-infringing copies of other artists' works.
Or take the litigation over Cady Noland's 1990 work "Cowboys Milking." In February, art dealer Marc Jancou sued Sotheby's and Ms. Noland for $26 million (later adding $20 million more to the claim for damages). The auction house had agreed to sell "Cowboys Milking" for Mr. Jancou, but according to the dealer's court filing, Sotheby's pulled it from the auction at the last moment, at the artist's request. According to the art-industry newsletter Baer Faxt, Ms. Noland had "disavowed" the work.
Can an artist disown a piece long ago sold? And, if so, does the artist have to give a reason? Would it be reason enough if a work were slightly damaged, or if an artist simply no longer liked the work of her salad days? And what then? Does a work cease to be art if the artist renounces it?
This last question, in particular, is the sort of ontological question philosophers make a specialty of noodling. But increasingly these tricky theoreticals about the nature of art are being answered, not by the heirs of Aristotle but by the judiciary. We are in the age of courthouse aesthetics.
by Eric Felten, WSJ | Read more:
Illustration: Alex Nabaum
How Octopuses Make Themselves Invisible
[ed. Amazing. I knew they had camouflage capabilities, but this is beyond the beyonds.]
Do You Really Want to Live Forever?
Cave’s fascinating new book, Immortality, posits that civilization is a major side effect of humanity's attempts to live forever. He argues that our sophisticated minds inexorably recognize that, like all other living things, we will one day die. Simultaneously, Cave asserts, “The one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This is what I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization.”
Cave identifies four immortality narratives that drive civilizations over time which he calls; (1) Staying Alive, (2) Resurrection, (3) Soul, and (4) Legacy. Cave gracefully marches through his four immortality narratives citing examples from history, psychology, and religion up to the modern day. “At its core, a civilization is a collection of life extension technologies: agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing to stave off cold, architecture to provide shelter and safety, better weapons for hunting and defense, and medicine to combat injury and disease,” he writes.
In the Staying Alive narrative Cave opens with the quest of the First Emperor of China to find the elixir of life but lands us soon the 21st century where transhumanists aim to use modern science to finally achieve the goal of perpetual youthful life. He notes that in the last century, humans have in fact doubled average human life expectancy.
Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating physical death? This is the goal of transhumanists like theoretical biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey who has devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) program. SENS technologies would include genetic interventions to rejuvenate cells, stem cell transplants to replace aged organs and tissues, and nano-machines to patrol our bodies to prevent infections and kill nascent cancers. Ultimately, Cave cannot argue that these life-extension technologies will not work for individuals but suggests that they would produce problems like overpopulation and environmental collapse that would eventually subvert them. He also cites calculations done by a demographer that assuming aging and disease is defeated by biomedical technology accidents would still do in would-be immortals. The average life expectancy of medical immortals would be 5,775 years. Frankly, I will be happy to take that.
Resurrection is his next immortality narrative. Of course, the most prevalent resurrection story is that of Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago. The New Testament explicitly states that one day every individual will once again live in his or her real but improved physical bodies. Physical resurrection is also the orthodox belief of the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam. Thus, Cave notes, half of the world’s population officially believes in the future resurrection of their physical bodies. He adds, however, that many Christians, Jews, and Muslims actually subscribe to another immortality narrative, Soul.
Cave identifies three major problems with the Resurrection Narrative: the Cannibal problem, the Transformation problem, and the Duplication problem. Briefly, if resurrection is to mean anything, it must mean that a specific individual is brought back to life. The question is what happens when atoms have been shared by more than one person: Who gets to use the specific nitrogen and carbon atoms when everyone is brought back to life? I don’t think that that is much of problem since atoms are interchangeable and presumably God could simply put any random carbon and nitrogen atoms back in the same places they were in your physical body. They needn’t be the exact same atoms that you had when you died.
The Transformation problem is harder. Many believers would have died old, decrepit, and demented. That’s not how they believe they will be resurrected; they expect to get better, incorruptible bodies. By being thus transformed would the resurrected believer really be the same person who had died or a different person? And then there is the problem of duplication. God could not just reassemble a believer as she was when she died, he could also reassemble her as a 5-year-old girl. Cave argues that these three problems calls into question the notion that it would truly be a specific individual believer rising from the grave. (...)
Cave notes that this focus on preserving a person’s mind leads other modern would-be computational resurrectionists to argue for uploading minds (information encoded in an individual’s brain) onto another piece of hardware, an electronic avatar, a robot, or another brain which would be psychologically identical to the original mind. Cave argues that computational resurrection does not actually achieve immortality for a specific individual, but merely makes an exact psychological copy of him. There is the additional problem that if minds can be digitized they can be duplicated many times. If this occurs who then is the original resurrectee? “When you closed your eyes on your deathbed, you could not expect to open them again in silicon form,” he explains. The result of mind uploading “would all just be high-tech ways of producing a counterfeit you.” (...)
The most popular immortality narrative is Soul. Most Christians now believe that their souls, which persist after death, will be reunited with their resurrected bodies. Souls thus solve a lot of the identity problems associated with the earlier Resurrection narrative. Cave argues that Soul narrative resolves the Mortality Paradox by denying “that the failing body is the true self, identifying the person instead with exactly that mental life that seems so inextinguishable.” In Christianity all souls are equal before God, so if the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of the universe is interested in your life then who are your politicians to ignore your desires?
What about the afterlife? Cave cites American evangelist James L. Garlow who says that in Heaven “your every desire is satisfied more abundantly than you’ve ever dreamed.” But what if your desire is to be reunited with your wife who instead desires to spend her eternity with her childhood sweetheart? A more sophisticated theocentric view of the soul’s afterlife is that Heaven is the eternal exaltation of God. But what can this mean? Cave points out that an afterlife without time is not really a life at all. “Everything that makes up a human life—experience, learning, growth, communication, even singing hosannas—requires the passage of time. Without time, nothing can happen; it is a state of stasis, a cessation of thought and action,” he argues. “The attraction of the soul view was the unique aura it gave to every individual life, but its logical conclusion is an eternity of nothing, with life negated altogether.”
by Ronald Bailey, Reason | Read more:
Friday, June 1, 2012
Silence and Word
As we draw near to World Communications Day 2012, I would like to share with you some reflections concerning an aspect of the human process of communication which, despite its importance, is often overlooked and which, at the present time, it would seem especially necessary to recall. It concerns the relationship between silence and word: two aspects of communication which need to be kept in balance, to alternate and to be integrated with one another if authentic dialogue and deep closeness between people are to be achieved. When word and silence become mutually exclusive, communication breaks down, either because it gives rise to confusion or because, on the contrary, it creates an atmosphere of coldness; when they complement one another, however, communication acquires value and meaning.
Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible. It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression. Silence, then, gives rise to even more active communication, requiring sensitivity and a capacity to listen that often makes manifest the true measure and nature of the relationships involved. When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.
The process of communication nowadays is largely fuelled by questions in search of answers. Search engines and social networks have become the starting point of communication for many people who are seeking advice, ideas, information and answers. In our time, the internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers – indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive. Amid the complexity and diversity of the world of communications, however, many people find themselves confronted with the ultimate questions of human existence: Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? It is important to affirm those who ask these questions, and to open up the possibility of a profound dialogue, by means of words and interchange, but also through the call to silent reflection, something that is often more eloquent than a hasty answer and permits seekers to reach into the depths of their being and open themselves to the path towards knowledge that God has inscribed in human hearts.
by Pope Benedictus XVI | Read more:
Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible. It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression. Silence, then, gives rise to even more active communication, requiring sensitivity and a capacity to listen that often makes manifest the true measure and nature of the relationships involved. When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.
The process of communication nowadays is largely fuelled by questions in search of answers. Search engines and social networks have become the starting point of communication for many people who are seeking advice, ideas, information and answers. In our time, the internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers – indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive. Amid the complexity and diversity of the world of communications, however, many people find themselves confronted with the ultimate questions of human existence: Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? It is important to affirm those who ask these questions, and to open up the possibility of a profound dialogue, by means of words and interchange, but also through the call to silent reflection, something that is often more eloquent than a hasty answer and permits seekers to reach into the depths of their being and open themselves to the path towards knowledge that God has inscribed in human hearts.
by Pope Benedictus XVI | Read more:
Morals and the Machine
[ed. The emerging field of machine ethics. Can it keep pace with the development of robotic technology?]
In the classic science-fiction film “2001”, the ship’s computer, HAL, faces a dilemma. His instructions require him both to fulfil the ship’s mission (investigating an artefact near Jupiter) and to keep the mission’s true purpose secret from the ship’s crew. To resolve the contradiction, he tries to kill the crew.
As robots become more autonomous, the notion of computer-controlled machines facing ethical decisions is moving out of the realm of science fiction and into the real world. Society needs to find ways to ensure that they are better equipped to make moral judgments than HAL was.
A bestiary of robots
Military technology, unsurprisingly, is at the forefront of the march towards self-determining machines (see Technology Quarterly). Its evolution is producing an extraordinary variety of species. The Sand Flea can leap through a window or onto a roof, filming all the while. It then rolls along on wheels until it needs to jump again. RiSE, a six-legged robo-cockroach, can climb walls. LS3, a dog-like robot, trots behind a human over rough terrain, carrying up to 180kg of supplies. SUGV, a briefcase-sized robot, can identify a man in a crowd and follow him. There is a flying surveillance drone the weight of a wedding ring, and one that carries 2.7 tonnes of bombs.
Robots are spreading in the civilian world, too, from the flight deck to the operating theatre (see article). Passenger aircraft have long been able to land themselves. Driverless trains are commonplace. Volvo’s new V40 hatchback essentially drives itself in heavy traffic. It can brake when it senses an imminent collision, as can Ford’s B-Max minivan. Fully self-driving vehicles are being tested around the world. Google’s driverless cars have clocked up more than 250,000 miles in America, and Nevada has become the first state to regulate such trials on public roads. In Barcelona a few days ago, Volvo demonstrated a platoon of autonomous cars on a motorway.
As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency. Weapons systems currently have human operators “in the loop”, but as they grow more sophisticated, it will be possible to shift to “on the loop” operation, with machines carrying out orders autonomously.
As that happens, they will be presented with ethical dilemmas. Should a drone fire on a house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians? Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants? Should a robot involved in disaster recovery tell people the truth about what is happening if that risks causing a panic? Such questions have led to the emergence of the field of “machine ethics”, which aims to give machines the ability to make such choices appropriately—in other words, to tell right from wrong.
by The Economist | Read more:
Illustration by Derek Bacon
In the classic science-fiction film “2001”, the ship’s computer, HAL, faces a dilemma. His instructions require him both to fulfil the ship’s mission (investigating an artefact near Jupiter) and to keep the mission’s true purpose secret from the ship’s crew. To resolve the contradiction, he tries to kill the crew. As robots become more autonomous, the notion of computer-controlled machines facing ethical decisions is moving out of the realm of science fiction and into the real world. Society needs to find ways to ensure that they are better equipped to make moral judgments than HAL was.
A bestiary of robots
Military technology, unsurprisingly, is at the forefront of the march towards self-determining machines (see Technology Quarterly). Its evolution is producing an extraordinary variety of species. The Sand Flea can leap through a window or onto a roof, filming all the while. It then rolls along on wheels until it needs to jump again. RiSE, a six-legged robo-cockroach, can climb walls. LS3, a dog-like robot, trots behind a human over rough terrain, carrying up to 180kg of supplies. SUGV, a briefcase-sized robot, can identify a man in a crowd and follow him. There is a flying surveillance drone the weight of a wedding ring, and one that carries 2.7 tonnes of bombs.
Robots are spreading in the civilian world, too, from the flight deck to the operating theatre (see article). Passenger aircraft have long been able to land themselves. Driverless trains are commonplace. Volvo’s new V40 hatchback essentially drives itself in heavy traffic. It can brake when it senses an imminent collision, as can Ford’s B-Max minivan. Fully self-driving vehicles are being tested around the world. Google’s driverless cars have clocked up more than 250,000 miles in America, and Nevada has become the first state to regulate such trials on public roads. In Barcelona a few days ago, Volvo demonstrated a platoon of autonomous cars on a motorway.
As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency. Weapons systems currently have human operators “in the loop”, but as they grow more sophisticated, it will be possible to shift to “on the loop” operation, with machines carrying out orders autonomously.
As that happens, they will be presented with ethical dilemmas. Should a drone fire on a house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians? Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants? Should a robot involved in disaster recovery tell people the truth about what is happening if that risks causing a panic? Such questions have led to the emergence of the field of “machine ethics”, which aims to give machines the ability to make such choices appropriately—in other words, to tell right from wrong.
by The Economist | Read more:
Illustration by Derek Bacon
The 1 Percent’s Problem
So, no: there’s little debate over the basic fact of widening inequality. The debate is over its meaning. From the right, you sometimes hear the argument made that inequality is basically a good thing: as the rich increasingly benefit, so does everyone else. This argument is false: while the rich have been growing richer, most Americans (and not just those at the bottom) have been unable to maintain their standard of living, let alone to keep pace. A typical full-time male worker receives the same income today he did a third of a century ago.
From the left, meanwhile, the widening inequality often elicits an appeal for simple justice: why should so few have so much when so many have so little? It’s not hard to see why, in a market-driven age where justice itself is a commodity to be bought and sold, some would dismiss that argument as the stuff of pious sentiment.
Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price.
Let me run through a few reasons why.
The Consumption Problem
When one interest group holds too much power, it succeeds in getting policies that help itself in the short term rather than help society as a whole over the long term. This is what has happened in America when it comes to tax policy, regulatory policy, and public investment. The consequence of channeling gains in income and wealth in one direction only is easy to see when it comes to ordinary household spending, which is one of the engines of the American economy.
It is no accident that the periods in which the broadest cross sections of Americans have reported higher net incomes—when inequality has been reduced, partly as a result of progressive taxation—have been the periods in which the U.S. economy has grown the fastest. It is likewise no accident that the current recession, like the Great Depression, was preceded by large increases in inequality. When too much money is concentrated at the top of society, spending by the average American is necessarily reduced—or at least it will be in the absence of some artificial prop. Moving money from the bottom to the top lowers consumption because higher-income individuals consume, as a fraction of their income, less than lower-income individuals do.
In our imaginations, it doesn’t always seem as if this is the case, because spending by the wealthy is so conspicuous. Just look at the color photographs in the back pages of the weekend Wall Street Journal of houses for sale. But the phenomenon makes sense when you do the math. Consider someone like Mitt Romney, whose income in 2010 was $21.7 million. Even if Romney chose to live a much more indulgent lifestyle, he would spend only a fraction of that sum in a typical year to support himself and his wife in their several homes. But take the same amount of money and divide it among 500 people—say, in the form of jobs paying $43,400 apiece—and you’ll find that almost all of the money gets spent.
The relationship is straightforward and ironclad: as more money becomes concentrated at the top, aggregate demand goes into a decline. Unless something else happens by way of intervention, total demand in the economy will be less than what the economy is capable of supplying—and that means that there will be growing unemployment, which will dampen demand even further. In the 1990s that “something else” was the tech bubble. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was the housing bubble. Today, the only recourse, amid deep recession, is government spending—which is exactly what those at the top are now hoping to curb.
by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Stephen Doyle
There’s No Stopping the Rise of E-Money
Cash’s indirect costs are huge, too. In a 2011 study [PDF], Edgar L. Feige of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, and Richard Cebula of Jacksonville University, in Florida, found that in the United States 18 to 19 percent of total reportable income is hidden from federal tax men, a shortfall of about US $500 billion. The Justice Department estimated in 2008 that secret offshore bank accounts were responsible for about one-fifth of the tax gap, suggesting that the remaining 80 percent is attributable to unreported cash. (...)
Thus the allure of the mobile phone as an alternative to cash. The enabling technology has finally arrived, and it’s taking root because the business drivers (that is, the high cost of cash) and the social drivers (cash’s disproportionate cost to the poor) were already there. And just as the plastic card and the Web made it easy for us to pay merchants, the mobile phone will soon make it easy for us to pay each other.
So let's assume that the mobile phone will take over and that in a few years’ time, you’ll be able to pay Walmart or your window cleaner or your niece with your mobile phone. In this world, switching among dollars and euros and frequent-flier miles and Facebook Credits and Google Bucks and any other form of money will be just a matter of choosing from a menu on the phone. The cost of introducing new currencies will collapse—anyone will be able to do it. The future of money, in other words, won’t be that single galactic currency of science fiction. (We already know that, because we can’t even make a single currency work between Germany and Greece, let alone Ganymede and Gamma Centauri.) Instead, we can look forward not merely to hundreds but thousands or even millions of currencies. And though regulators may oppose the trend, they can’t hold it back.
That must sound as crazy to you as the idea of paper money once did to your ancestors, but it really isn’t. Trying to imagine a wallet with a hundred currencies in it and a Coke machine with a hundred slots for them is, of course, nuts. But based on the available currencies in your mobile “wallet” and prevailing market conditions, your phone and the Coke machine will be able to negotiate an exchange rate in a fraction of a second.
Likewise, I don’t want to carry around a hundred different retailer credit and loyalty cards, but my phone can hold a zillion. So when I go to Starbucks, my phone will select my Starbucks app, load up my Starbucks account, and generally not bother me about the details. When I walk next door into Target, my phone will select my Target app, fire up my Target card, and get down to business.
Who will want to issue these new currencies? Corporations, for starters. When Edward de Bono wrote The IBM Dollar: A Proposal for the Wider Use of “Target” Currencies back in 1994, he looked forward to a time when “the successors to Bill Gates will have put the successors to Alan Greenspan out of business,” arguing that it would be more efficient for companies to issue money than equity. Even if all I’ve got is Microsoft Moola, and you want to get paid in Samsung Shekels, who cares? Our phones can sort it out for us.
by David G.W. Birch, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Illustration: Harry Campbell
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)