Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Is Stretching Useful?
Today we have a guest post from author Alex Hutchinson. Alex writes a
monthly column in Runner’s World (they also host his excellent Sweat Science blog) and is a Senior Editor at Canadian Running magazine. You can find more on Alex at the bottom of this post.
As Alex mentions below, he recently published a fantastic book which has a rather large section on the health benefits of stretching (or lack thereof). As a longtime skeptic of stretching myself, I was very excited when he agreed to summarize the research evidence in a guest post. Enjoy the post!
I guess I should start by stating my bias: I don’t like stretching.
For over a decade, I stretched every day, usually twice a day – but I
never enjoyed it. I still try to be as impartial as possible in
analyzing the evidence for and against stretching, but I figure you have
the right to know that I’m a stretching skeptic!
So what is this evidence I refer to? Over the past decade or so, there has been a complete change in how coaches and exercise scientists view stretching. It’s the biggest change in elite training that I’m aware of during that time, and these days it’s the biggest gap between elite athletes and the average person at the gym. I devote an entire chapter to the topic in my recent science-of-exercise book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?, and I’m going to draw on that to present a few highlights of the recent research.
1. Does stretching help you avoid injury during exercise?
This is very difficult to “prove” one way or the other, because every person and every injury is unique. Still, a 2004 systematic review that analyzed 361 studies concluded that “stretching was not significantly associated with a reduction in total injuries.” Other reviews have reached similar conclusions. The early studies that suggested stretching would help always included stretching as part of a warm-up; it now appears that a warm-up (e.g. five minutes of gentle jogging) is important but stretching isn’t.
2. Does stretching help you avoid soreness after exercise?
No. A 2011 Cochrane review of 12 randomized studies with more than 2,000 subjects in total concluded that “muscle stretching, whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness.” This is not a surprise: post-exercise soreness is thought to result from microscopic damage to muscle fibres; you can’t “undamage” the muscles by stretching them.
by Travis Saunders, Plos Blogs | Read more:
As Alex mentions below, he recently published a fantastic book which has a rather large section on the health benefits of stretching (or lack thereof). As a longtime skeptic of stretching myself, I was very excited when he agreed to summarize the research evidence in a guest post. Enjoy the post!
I guess I should start by stating my bias: I don’t like stretching.
For over a decade, I stretched every day, usually twice a day – but I
never enjoyed it. I still try to be as impartial as possible in
analyzing the evidence for and against stretching, but I figure you have
the right to know that I’m a stretching skeptic!So what is this evidence I refer to? Over the past decade or so, there has been a complete change in how coaches and exercise scientists view stretching. It’s the biggest change in elite training that I’m aware of during that time, and these days it’s the biggest gap between elite athletes and the average person at the gym. I devote an entire chapter to the topic in my recent science-of-exercise book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?, and I’m going to draw on that to present a few highlights of the recent research.
1. Does stretching help you avoid injury during exercise?
This is very difficult to “prove” one way or the other, because every person and every injury is unique. Still, a 2004 systematic review that analyzed 361 studies concluded that “stretching was not significantly associated with a reduction in total injuries.” Other reviews have reached similar conclusions. The early studies that suggested stretching would help always included stretching as part of a warm-up; it now appears that a warm-up (e.g. five minutes of gentle jogging) is important but stretching isn’t.
2. Does stretching help you avoid soreness after exercise?
No. A 2011 Cochrane review of 12 randomized studies with more than 2,000 subjects in total concluded that “muscle stretching, whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness.” This is not a surprise: post-exercise soreness is thought to result from microscopic damage to muscle fibres; you can’t “undamage” the muscles by stretching them.
by Travis Saunders, Plos Blogs | Read more:
Return to Sender
On a warm evening in the middle of march, V.A. Shiva Ayyudarai sat in the front row of a packed auditorium at the MIT media lab.
Dressed in a black blazer and T-shirt, Ayyadurai was on comfortable turf. He had four degrees from the Institute, lectured in two of its departments, and, at 48, had earned his place on a campus where success is measured in the number of businesses launched and millions earned.
Ayyadurai — known to everyone as Shiva — has been a Fulbright scholar, a Lemelson-MIT student prize nominee, and the entrepreneurial brains behind seven businesses, including EchoMail, a $200 million company that counted Nike, the U.S. Senate, and the Clinton White House as customers. But his greatest achievement came when he was just 14 and living with his immigrant parents in New Jersey. Back then, toiling away in his spare time, Shiva had invented e-mail, an accomplishment that would, in time, change the course of human communication — a fact not lost on Shiva, whose personal website is called inventorofemail.com.
For all his spectacular successes, Shiva was most proud of devising e-mail. Yet he’d been plagued for decades by a guilty sense that his invention had led to the unraveling of another great component of human — or at least American — communication: the United States Postal Service. Since as far back as 1997, Shiva had been trying to get the post office to imagine a world beyond merely delivering letters and packages, to embrace and profit from the growing business of e-mail. But for reasons he’d never understood, the U.S. Mail had been content to keep things as they were. Last fall, when the post office announced massive layoffs and service cuts in a desperate scramble to deal with its billions in debt, Shiva had had enough. “I think that if the Postal Service dies,” Shiva said at the time, “it will be the end of democracy as we know it.” He proposed that the post office create a new form of e-mail, one that was safe, private, and subject to the same federal regulations that protect the bills and junk mail that are delivered to our mailboxes. He was flummoxed by the agency’s ineptitude: “What the f*#@ was the #USPS management doing for 10 years?” he tweeted. “They should have owned EMAIL …. ” Caustic comments like these coming from the inventor of e-mail sparked the interest of the media, and soon Shiva was being quoted in Fast Company and Time magazines.
Then, in a breakthrough, the post office’s inspector general came calling, asking Shiva for his ideas on how they could enter the digital age. A few weeks later, the Smithsonian announced that it was accepting the documents from Shiva’s adolescent e-mail work into its archives, where they would be counted among other great inventions like the telegraph, the light bulb, and the artificial heart. While he was in DC to hand off his papers, the Washington Post recorded a video series with Shiva and published a fawning profile of him.
Now he was at the MIT Media Lab with a group of experts he’d assembled for a panel discussion on “The Future of the Post Office.” Among the participants was the Postal Service’s inspector general himself, David Williams. Thirty years after inventing e-mail, Shiva had now positioned himself to solve a national crisis. His moment had arrived. But he kept looking nervously around the room. (...)
The truth is, I’m somewhat surprised, given all the controversy, that the Institute has gone forward with this event at all. Shiva’s detractors contacted several of the panelists, demanding that it be canceled to save the reputation of the school.
You can feel the tension in the room as David Thorburn, director of MIT’s communications forum, steps to the podium.“I’ve received a number of thoughtful and sometimes not-so-thoughtful messages on e-mail in the past weeks from MIT alumni and others,” Thornburn says. “But today’s event is not about the history of e-mail, nor about Shiva himself. It’s about the future of the post office.”
by Janellle Nanos, Boston Magazine | Read more:
Photo by Miller Mobley
The Small Cardboard Box
For as long as archivists at Rutgers University could remember, a small cardboard box marked with the letter W in black ink had sat unopened in a dusty corner of the special collections of the Alexander Library. Next to it were 60 sturdy archive boxes of papers, a legacy of the university’s most famous scientist: Selman A. Waksman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1952 for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis.
The 60 boxes contained details of how streptomycin was found — and also of the murky story behind it, a vicious legal battle between Dr. Waksman and his graduate student Albert Schatz over who deserved credit.
Dr. Waksman died in 1973; after Dr. Schatz’s death in 2005, the papers were much in demand by researchers trying to piece together what really happened between the professor and his student. But nobody looked in the small cardboard box.
The story of streptomycin is no ordinary tale of discovery. It began in August 1943, when Dr. Schatz, a 23-year-old graduate student at the Rutgers College of Agriculture, isolated the powerful antibiotic produced by a bacterium, Streptomyces griseus, that had been found in a pot of farmyard soil.
His supervisor, Professor Waksman, arranged for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to test the substance in guinea pigs, and then in humans. It worked. Streptomycin, cleared up infections, including TB, that had defied even the first wonder drug, penicillin.
As word of the discovery spread, reporters flocked to Rutgers to record the amazing event. But in telling and retelling the story, Dr. Waksman slowly began to drop Dr. Schatz’s name and claim sole credit. He also arranged with Rutgers to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from the patent that he and Dr. Schatz were awarded; Dr. Schatz received nothing.
Dr. Schatz became aware of the deal when Dr. Waksman started sending him $500 checks — $1,500 altogether — that he said came from funds he had been receiving for the sales of streptomycin. Dr. Schatz wanted to know more, but the professor wouldn’t tell him.
by Peter Pringle, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries
Monday, June 11, 2012
Who’s Got Your Back?
In a city with more than 20,000 registered real estate agents, is it any wonder that choosing one can be a difficult and sometimes fraught process?
There’s the agent who sold your best friend’s apartment for 20 percent more than she dreamed possible. But what about the downstairs neighbor who never misses a chance to remind you that he’s a broker? And what would Aunt Myra say if you didn’t use Cousin Bob, who just got into real estate and hasn’t sold anything yet? (“He just needs a little confidence.”)
A good broker can help you make sound decisions and guide you through what might easily be the most expensive and emotionally charged transaction of your life. So, how to weed out brokers who can’t stop talking about themselves, or who can’t tear their eyes from their BlackBerrys long enough to answer a question, and perhaps more important, know shockingly little about their listings or the market?
Whether you’re buying or selling, interviewing an agent is the best way to figure all of that out and to determine whether you would get along over the course of an intense several months. The interview can be as informal as a quick conversation at an open house and a follow-up phone call.
Find out what a broker has already sold and how he or she would help you sell or find a home. Dottie Herman, the chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman, also suggested asking what the broker would do “if not everything goes right” and an apartment doesn’t sell quickly or a board rejects a buyer. “You want someone who has confidence and knowledge and who you have a rapport with,” she said. At the same time, she added, “You don’t want a know-it-all, because nobody knows it all.”
Sellers sign contracts with their listing agents, and many buyers also work with specific agents in finding a home. A buyer’s agent is paid by the seller in a deal, but will shepherd the buyer’s bid through to the closing, which could be especially helpful in the notoriously enigmatic co-op board process.
“For buyers, you’re not getting the discount or saving a commission,” said Diane M. Ramirez, the president of Halstead Property, “so if you don’t have a broker, you’re just on your own. Do you really want not to be represented when the other side is?”
Buyers who don’t work with a specific agent sometimes agree to “dual agency,” in which the seller’s broker also represents the buyer. But Frederick Peters, the president of Warburg Realty, recently wrote a blog post in which he challenged the notion of dual agency, saying what many brokers believe but are reluctant to admit. “The buyer wants to pay as little as he can; the seller wants to net as much as he can,” he wrote. “What agent can fight simultaneously for both those outcomes?”
In the end, both buyers and sellers should have representatives. People tend to gravitate to agents with whom they feel comfortable. It could be their Type A personality, a shared love of the opera, or a favorite neighborhood deli. Or maybe they vacation in the same place, or have children in the same school. Maybe the agent tells hilarious jokes. New York City’s legion of real estate agents can be categorized in many ways. Here are a few of them.
The Hand-Holder
Some agents are better than others at anticipating a client’s needs and at catering to people who need a little more attention through the machinations of a real estate deal. Someone who is patient and a good listener can play that part, be it for a jittery first-time buyer or a high-strung owner who needs frequent calming down.
Brian Lewis, an executive vice president of Halstead Property, is an easygoing Southerner who knows how to take the edge off the most frenzied real estate transaction.
“I take my cues from the client,” he said. “I understand that buying or selling a home is an emotional thing. When you add that emotion to the kind of money we’re dealing with, you get a perfect storm of crazy.”
by Vivian S. Toy, NY Times | Read more:
Wising Up to Facebook
After a period of idealizing social media, the public is beginning to recognize that these are enterprises with ambitions and appetites. They are businesses. Public companies have an imperative to grow profits, which Facebook will do by monetizing you and me — serving us up as the targets for precision-guided advertising.
One of the most interesting stories I’ve read in the recent, more aggressive spate of coverage was Somini Sengupta’s report in The Times about Facebook’s entry into the Washington influence game. Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive told me.
What might Facebook want from its new friends in Washington? It’s not hard to imagine. Since Facebook’s most promising path to prosperity is selling ads based on your likes and dislikes, the company will be wary of any government attempt to enforce privacy standards that interfere with the company’s ability to mine your information. Since the company is jostling for dominance with the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter and Amazon, it will be paying attention to antitrust actions that could curtail its ability to use its market muscle. (Jonathan Zittrain sent me a graphic that gives you a little sense of Facebook’s power in the marketplace. In 2010 Facebook was displeased with the developers of a game called Critter Island, one of many online games and services that basically rent space and services in the Facebook condominium. Facebook simply disabled the game, and the chart shows the user base collapsing from 14 million to zero in a couple of days.)
Beyond Washington, activists for various causes have upbraided Facebook for failing to protect dissidents who use the site to expose and mobilize against oppressive regimes. Critics say the company’s policy of forbidding pseudonyms — intended to assure more civil behavior online (and, a cynic might speculate, to enrich the value of the user base to advertisers) — makes it a risky communications tool in authoritarian states.
“That’s fine if you live in an ideal world,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, whose recent book, “Consent of the Networked,” examines the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace. “If you’re an activist in China, it leaves you extremely vulnerable.”
Her book persuaded one high-profile journalist, Steve Coll, to announce in The New Yorker that he was renouncing his citizenship in “Facebookistan,” which he had come to see as a highhanded corporate autocracy.
MacKinnon herself is not encouraging an exodus. She favors sticking around to help Facebook become more responsible. “It’s kind of like China — do you engage, or disinvest?” she said. “I’m still at the engagement stage. The main thing is that people need to act more as constituents, not as passive residents.”
by Bill Keller, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Nicholas Blechman
One of the most interesting stories I’ve read in the recent, more aggressive spate of coverage was Somini Sengupta’s report in The Times about Facebook’s entry into the Washington influence game. Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive told me. What might Facebook want from its new friends in Washington? It’s not hard to imagine. Since Facebook’s most promising path to prosperity is selling ads based on your likes and dislikes, the company will be wary of any government attempt to enforce privacy standards that interfere with the company’s ability to mine your information. Since the company is jostling for dominance with the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter and Amazon, it will be paying attention to antitrust actions that could curtail its ability to use its market muscle. (Jonathan Zittrain sent me a graphic that gives you a little sense of Facebook’s power in the marketplace. In 2010 Facebook was displeased with the developers of a game called Critter Island, one of many online games and services that basically rent space and services in the Facebook condominium. Facebook simply disabled the game, and the chart shows the user base collapsing from 14 million to zero in a couple of days.)
Beyond Washington, activists for various causes have upbraided Facebook for failing to protect dissidents who use the site to expose and mobilize against oppressive regimes. Critics say the company’s policy of forbidding pseudonyms — intended to assure more civil behavior online (and, a cynic might speculate, to enrich the value of the user base to advertisers) — makes it a risky communications tool in authoritarian states.
“That’s fine if you live in an ideal world,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, whose recent book, “Consent of the Networked,” examines the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace. “If you’re an activist in China, it leaves you extremely vulnerable.”
Her book persuaded one high-profile journalist, Steve Coll, to announce in The New Yorker that he was renouncing his citizenship in “Facebookistan,” which he had come to see as a highhanded corporate autocracy.
MacKinnon herself is not encouraging an exodus. She favors sticking around to help Facebook become more responsible. “It’s kind of like China — do you engage, or disinvest?” she said. “I’m still at the engagement stage. The main thing is that people need to act more as constituents, not as passive residents.”
by Bill Keller, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Nicholas Blechman
Stranglehold
Amazon Infographic: How a Single Company Gained a Stranglehold over Online Shopping and the Future of Retail.
Amazon is doubling in size every 2-3 years, putting it on pace to be bigger than Walmart by decade's end.
by Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local-Self Reliance
Amazon is doubling in size every 2-3 years, putting it on pace to be bigger than Walmart by decade's end.
by Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local-Self Reliance
Why Japan Prefers Pets to Parenthood
In a smart and expensive neighbourhood of Tokyo, Toshiko Horikoshi relaxes by playing her grand piano. She’s a successful eye surgeon, with a private clinic, a stylish apartment, a Porsche and two pet pooches: Tinkerbell, a chihuahua, and Ginger, a poodle. “Japanese dog owners think a dog is like a child,” says Toshiko. “I have no children, so I really love my two dogs.”
Many Japanese women like Toshiko prefer pets to parenthood. Startlingly, in a country panicking over its plummeting birthrate, there are now many more pets than children. While the birthrate has been falling dramatically and the average age of Japan’s population has been steadily climbing, Japan has become a pet superpower. Official estimates put the pet population at 22 million or more, but there are only 16.6 million children under 15.
Tinkerbell and Ginger have their own room and a wardrobe full of designer clothes. They have jumpers, dresses, coats and fancy dress outfits, neatly hung on jewelled hangers; hats, sunglasses and even tiny shoes. Toshiko says she shops for her dogs most weekends and they get new clothes each season.
In Japan designer labels such as Chanel, Dior, Hermès and Gucci offer luxury dog products. This canine couture doesn’t come cheap. A poodle pullover can cost $250 (around £160) or more. In many parts of Tokyo, it is easier to buy clothes for dogs than for children. Boutiques sell everything from frilly frocks to designer jeans, from nappies to organic nibbles, and smart “doggie bags” and buggies or pushchairs to transport them in. (...).
Despite the economic stagnation, people seem happy to spend any spare money on photo sessions, massages and treats for their four-legged “babies”. The average fertility rate is now 1.39 children per woman – well below the number needed to keep the population stable. Japan has, in effect, a self-imposed one-child policy. Government projections show if current trends continue, today’s population of 128 million will fall to 43 million over the next century.
“The most important reason for Japan’s declining birthrate is less sex,” says Dr Kunio Kitamara, director of Japan’s Family Planning Research Centre. His annual surveys indicate that the nation’s libido has been lagging in the last decade. The birthrate has declined, but fewer contraceptives are being used and there are fewer abortions and lower rate of sexually transmitted diseases. “Why?” asks Dr Kitamara: “Less sex!”
by Ruth Evans and Roland Buerk, The Long Good Read | Read more:
Photo: Flickr / lauriepix1 via:
Many Japanese women like Toshiko prefer pets to parenthood. Startlingly, in a country panicking over its plummeting birthrate, there are now many more pets than children. While the birthrate has been falling dramatically and the average age of Japan’s population has been steadily climbing, Japan has become a pet superpower. Official estimates put the pet population at 22 million or more, but there are only 16.6 million children under 15. Tinkerbell and Ginger have their own room and a wardrobe full of designer clothes. They have jumpers, dresses, coats and fancy dress outfits, neatly hung on jewelled hangers; hats, sunglasses and even tiny shoes. Toshiko says she shops for her dogs most weekends and they get new clothes each season.
In Japan designer labels such as Chanel, Dior, Hermès and Gucci offer luxury dog products. This canine couture doesn’t come cheap. A poodle pullover can cost $250 (around £160) or more. In many parts of Tokyo, it is easier to buy clothes for dogs than for children. Boutiques sell everything from frilly frocks to designer jeans, from nappies to organic nibbles, and smart “doggie bags” and buggies or pushchairs to transport them in. (...).
Despite the economic stagnation, people seem happy to spend any spare money on photo sessions, massages and treats for their four-legged “babies”. The average fertility rate is now 1.39 children per woman – well below the number needed to keep the population stable. Japan has, in effect, a self-imposed one-child policy. Government projections show if current trends continue, today’s population of 128 million will fall to 43 million over the next century.
“The most important reason for Japan’s declining birthrate is less sex,” says Dr Kunio Kitamara, director of Japan’s Family Planning Research Centre. His annual surveys indicate that the nation’s libido has been lagging in the last decade. The birthrate has declined, but fewer contraceptives are being used and there are fewer abortions and lower rate of sexually transmitted diseases. “Why?” asks Dr Kitamara: “Less sex!”
by Ruth Evans and Roland Buerk, The Long Good Read | Read more:
Photo: Flickr / lauriepix1 via:
Empire of Ice
The island is named Oooguruk, an Inupiaq word meaning “bearded seal,” an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska’s North Slope. The Slope is where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline starts, where the crude gets pumped up from more than a mile inside the earth, then gets sent on the 800-mile journey south to Valdez, Alaska, where the pipeline ends and tankers come and load the crude up and deliver it down the coast. There, in places like northern Washington and Long Beach, California, it gets processed into the fuel America now so grudgingly remembers makes the world go round.
People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska’s North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho. For centuries native Eskimos cut blocks of oil-soaked tundra from natural seeps to use as fuel. In the 1920s, explorers arrived and began poking holes. In 1968 they discovered Prudhoe Bay State No. 1, the largest oil field in North America and one of the largest in the world, and a year later the adjacent Kuparuk field, the second-largest. Today, five of our ten largest oil fields are on Alaska’s North Slope, where twenty-four separate fields pump out about 16 percent of our total domestic oil supply.
A person can’t just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches. The gateway to the oil fields is the town of Deadhorse, where the airport is, and where security restricts passage to anyone but workers who fly in and get bused to camps for two-week hitches.
It took nearly a year for me to gain access to the Slope. The corporate giants who control the fields—BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil—have little to gain from public scrutiny. Rarely do stories of Alaska’s oil emerge unless there is a freak accident to talk about—the odd spill, usually set against a snowy backdrop featuring a winsome caribou looking dismayed about the greedy nature of the human race. But Pioneer Natural Resources—the company that built the island, where TooDogs is in charge of the rig and Kung Fu plays the fiddle and Turtle fake-hates Jason for lying to him about being married to a stripper named Onyx—was willing to allow me in. Pioneer is the first independent operator to produce oil on the Slope, a market cornered by the three majors for its entire history. In many ways, it represents a glimmer of hope. Everyone knows the oil up here is running out; production is declining 6 percent a year, down from an all-time high of 2 million barrels a day in 1988 to 700,000 today. But everyone also knows the oil isn’t really running out—it’s just a lot harder to get to. It is a common story in the saga of natural resources, whether you are talking coal or gas or oil: The big companies suck out the easy, vast reservoirs, and then in come the little companies nimble enough to pick away at the leftovers.
The ongoing debate over whether or not we should be drilling for oil in Alaska—onward to ANWR to the east—typically leaves out one factor: We are drilling for oil in Alaska, every hour of every day for the past thirty years, drilling in some of the most extreme conditions on earth, where the windchill can easily reach minus ninety-eight degrees, so cold that you have to leave your pickup running twenty-four hours a day or you’ll never get it started again, where it is pitch dark for nearly two months each winter, where people live without families, without homes, without access to so much of what most of us think of when we think of what it means to be human.
by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ (2008) | Read more:
Photo: Christopher Lamarca
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?
We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now. We don’t have computers we can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to the Laundromat.
As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them. (...)
Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”
That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new. (...)
Why did the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was expecting—the moon bases, the robot factories—fail to happen? There are two possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological change were unrealistic (in which case, we need to know why so many intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so many credible ideas and prospects).
by David Graeber, The Baffler | Read more:
Illustration Mark Fisher
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Guitar Zero
Can science turn a psychologist into Jimi Hendrix?
Are musicians born or made? All my life, I wanted to become musical but I always assumed that I never had a chance. My ears are dodgy, my fingers too clumsy. I have no sense of rhythm and a lousy sense of pitch. I have always loved music, but could never sing, let alone play an instrument; in school, I came to believe that I was destined to be a spectator rather than a participant, no matter how hard I tried.
As I grew older, I figured my chances only diminished. Our lives, once we finish school, tend to focus on execution rather than enrichment. Whether we are breadwinners or caretakers, our success is measured by outcomes. The work it takes to achieve those outcomes, we are meant to understand, is something that should happen quickly and behind closed doors. If the conventional wisdom is right, by the time we are adults it's too late to learn anything new. Children may be able to learn anything, but if you wanted to learn French you should have started when you were six.
Until recently, science supported this theory. Virtually everybody in developmental psychology was a firm believer in "critical periods" of learning. The idea is that there are particular time windows in which complex skills, such as languages, can be learned; if you don't learn them by the time the window shuts, you never will. Case closed. But the more people have actually studied critical periods, the shakier the data has become. Although adults rarely achieve the same level of fluency that children do, the scientific research suggests that differences typically pertain more to accent than grammar.
There is also no magical window that slams shut the moment puberty begins. In fact, in recent years, scientists have identified people who have managed to learn languages with near-native fluency, even though they only started as adults.
If critical periods aren't quite so firm as once believed, a world of possibility emerges for the many adults who harbour secret dreams – whether to learn a language, become a pastry chef or pilot a plane. And quests such as these, no matter how quixotic they may seem, and whether they succeed, could bring unanticipated benefits, not just for their ultimate goals but for the journey itself.
Exercising our brains helps maintain them, by preserving plasticity (the capacity of the nervous system to learn new things), warding off degeneration and literally keeping the blood flowing. Beyond the potential benefits for our brains, there are benefits for our emotional wellbeing, too. There may be no better way to achieve lasting happiness – as opposed to mere fleeting pleasure – than pursuing a goal that helps broaden our horizons.
From primary school, every musical attempt I made ended in failure. The first time I tried to play guitar, a few years ago, my friend Dan Levitin (who had not yet finished his book This Is Your Brain on Music) kindly offered to give me a few lessons. When I came back to him after a week or two of practice, he quickly realised what my primary school teachers had realised long ago: that I had no sense of rhythm whatsoever. Dan offered me a metronome, and when that didn't help, he gave me something my teachers couldn't – a diagnosis: congenital arrhythmia.
And yet I never lost the desire to play. Music hasn't been studied as systematically as language in terms of critical periods, but there are certainly artists who started late and still became first-rate musicians. Tom Morello, the guitarist of Rage Against the Machine and among Rolling Stone magazine's greatest guitarists of all time, didn't start until he was 17. Patti Smith scarcely considered becoming a professional singer until she was in her mid-20s. Then there is the jazz guitar star Pat Martino, who relearned how to play after a brain aneurysm at the age of 35, and Dr John, who switched his primary allegiance from guitar to piano at 21 (after his left ring finger was badly injured in a bar-room fight) and won the first of his five Grammy awards in his late 40s.
Given my arrhythmia, I had no aspiration of reaching such heights, but at 38, long after I had completed my PhD and become a professor of cognitive psychology, I realised that my desire to become musical wasn't going away. I wanted to know whether I could overcome my intrinsic limits, my age and my lack of talent. Perhaps few people had less talent for music than I did, but few people wanted to be able to play more acutely.
I began to read the scientific literature. How did children learn music? Were there any lessons for adults? To my surprise, although children had been well studied, there was hardly any systematic research on people my age. Nobody seemed to know much about whether adults could learn to play late in life, and it wasn't just music that we knew little about; the literature on the capacity of adults to learn new skills in general was far sparser than I had imagined.
We know something about gradual declines in memory, but the only truly firm result I could find concerned perfect pitch (the ability to identify a single note in isolation). For that, one must indeed start early, but luckily for me and anyone else starting late, it is also clear that perfect pitch is more luxury than necessity. Duke Ellington didn't have it and neither did Igor Stravinsky (nor, for that matter, did Joey Ramone).
Other studies show some advantages for music learners who began earlier in life, but most of those don't take consideration of the total amount of practice. When it came to other aspects of music, such as the ability to improvise or compose, or even to learn a simple melody, there was almost no compelling literature. Although any number of studies have shown that the more you practise the better you get, startlingly few have compared what happens when people of different ages get the same amount of practice.
How could such a basic scientific question remain so unanswered? I wondered about this for months, until Caroline Palmer, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal, explained the answer to me. The problem wasn't a lack of scientific interest – it was a lack of subjects. To learn a musical instrument, you need to put in a lot of work – 10,000 hours is an oft-mentioned (if somewhat oversold) number – and to do a proper study, you'd need a reasonably large sample of participants, which is to say a big group of adult novices with sufficient commitment. Nobody has studied the outcomes of adults who put in 10,000 hours of practice starting at 42 because most people of that age have lives and responsibilities – few adult learners are prepared to invest the kind of time that a teenager has. No subjects, no science. At that point, I decided to become a guinea pig.
by Gary Marcus, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Jan Persson/Redferns
How to Say Goodbye
We are taught to start our stories at the beginning. We open with “once upon a time,” hoping to capture the nascent moment when everything came to be. But there are few lessons — in our culture, in our schooling, in our socialization — in how to exit well. Our culture applauds the spirit, gumption and promise of beginnings. We admire the entry — the moment when people launch themselves into something new, plan and execute a new project, embark on important work, get married, take an adventure. Our habit is to tilt toward the future, perpetually poised for the next move, the strategic opportunity.
By contrast, our exits are often ignored or invisible. They seem to represent the negative spaces in our life narratives. There is little appreciation or applause when we decide (or it is decided for us) that it is time to move on. We often slink away in the night hoping that no one will notice; that the darkness will make the departure disappear. If the entry recalls a straight and erect posture, a person who is strong and determined; then we imagine a person stooped, weakened, and despairing as he makes his exit. (...)
Why is all of this so important? Why do we need to wrest our exits from the shadows of inattention and guilt? Why must we readjust our cultural lens in order to see and compose the exits in our lives? Because, I believe, that our preoccupation with beginnings reveals only half the story; offering a partial and distorted view of the layers and trajectories of our growth and development; exaggerating the power and potential of our launches while neglecting the undertows of over-reaching. We might chart and judge our journeys very differently if we looked through the prism of our exits; a prism that would reveal the interplay of reflection and propulsion, hindsight and generativity that come with navigating our endings well.
The wisdom and insights I gathered from listening to dozens of people tell their stories of exit — some in the midst of composing them, others anticipating their departures, still others looking back over long years; revisiting the ancient narratives that had changed their lives — point to a radical reframing of the meaning and worthiness of exits, moving exits from the shadows to the light, from the invisible to the visible. In order for exits to be productive and expansive, we must give them our full attention, and grapple with the range of emotions they stir up in us; the often paradoxical sensations of loss and liberation, grief and jubilation, and pain and beauty that accompany our departures from our relationships, families, institutions, and communities; from our former identities. And the daily practice of navigating the small exits that punctuate our days — a hug at the door, a lullaby at bedtime, a thank you as you leave the office — helps us design and enact the grander send-offs with intentionality and care. The micro and the macro seem to be inextricably linked, the former informing and heralding the latter.
Another paradox: The exit signs are bold and blurred; clear and confusing. On the one hand, people can recall the exact moment —in bold relief, the blood red exit sign in a darkened movie theater — when they decided to leave, when they felt that they no longer had a choice, when all the forces and sensations came together in a perfect storm and they said to themselves, “I’m out of here.” On the other hand, those who take leave, see the messiness and ambivalence of their departures through their rear view mirrors; the long process of retreat that came well before the marked moment of announced leaving and the many aftershocks of exiting that followed. Exits feel both abrupt and final — a leap of faith, a moment of reckless abandon — and gnawingly cautious and iterative. Those who exit must be ready to ride out these paradoxical sensations.
by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Salon | Read more:
Credit: Rose-Marie Henriksson via Shutterstock
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