Monday, September 24, 2012
Dappled Things: Pinkhassov on Instagram
Digital photography and its mewling new children, Instagram among them, are causing arguments. There are studiedly old fogeys like Danny Lyon, who insist that a machine that doesn’t use film cannot be considered a camera. It’s no longer a common view: most photographers, professional or otherwise, either use digital or tacitly approve of it. Meanwhile, some serious photojournalists have reported wars and revolutions with the camera on a phone, and have won recognition for it.
The statistics beggar belief: 380 billion photos were taken in 2011, and about 10% of all the photographs currently in existence were taken in the past twelve months. Amateurs with Canon cameras and overpriced L-lenses have something to do with this; even more culpable is the incessant and overwhelming production of camera-phone images by huge numbers of people. (By the way, why is it called a “camera-phone” rather than the more logical “phone-camera”?)There are good reasons to be suspicious of this flood of images. What is the fate of art in the age of metastasized mechanical reproduction? These are cheap images; they are in fact less than cheap, for each image costs nothing. Post-processing is easy and rampant: beautiful light is added after the fact, depth of field is manipulated, nostalgia is drizzled on in unctuous tints of orange and green. The result is briefly beguiling to the senses but ultimately annoying to the soul, like fake breasts or MSG-rich food. I like Matt Pearce’s thoughtful polemic on this subject, published here on these pages: “Never before have we so rampantly exercised the ability to capture the way the world really looks and then so gorgeously disfigured it.”
But the problem with the new social photography isn’t merely about post-processing: after all, photographers have always manipulated their images in the darkroom. The filters that Hipstamatic and Instagram provide, the argument goes, are simply modern day alternatives to the dodging and burning that have always been integral to making photographs. This argument is in part true. But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.
All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He knows us too well.
by Teju Cole, The New Inquiry | Read more:
My Sister, The Candidate: The Politics Of Small-Town Campaigning
My family is intimately familiar with the intrigues of local politics. Two-and-a-half years ago, my father began publishing the weekly Washington County Observer in West Fork, Arkansas (population 2,500). The first-time editor and publisher conscripted family members into various positions—along with a few other innocents—with me as managing editor, my mom as proofreader, and my younger sister Lillian as public notices editor. From the start, the 1,000-circulation paper struggled financially, and it met its demise earlier this year, a fate roundly applauded by many city officials.
Now one of our family is stepping back into the spotlight: My sister Lillian is running for West Fork city clerk. It would have been journalistically irresponsible to not interview her about small-town campaigning, that mirror image of American politics, despite the obvious conflict of interest.
Jeff Winkler: So you’re running for West Fork city clerk?
Lillian Winkler: Yes. You have to get 30 signatures from West Fork registered voters that live in the city limits.
You know, I’m your brother and I’ve known you all your life, so I ask this as objectively as I can: As a 22-year-old, what exactly are your qualifications?
Well, I did work for two years at the local newspaper.
Yes, you did.
And I was able to learn about West Fork and how it works.
I also was the secretary in Future Farmers of America in high school. I completed real-estate school and worked in the juvenile drug court in Hot Springs. Now I work in the law school at the university [of Arkansas].
So what exactly does a city clerk do?
The City Clerk’s main job is to attend council meetings, take and transcribe the minutes, take notes and pretty much write a summary of the meetings. Also, some official documents require the signature of the mayor and the clerk.
From what I understand, the City Clerk position is currently vacant. The City Treasurer/Water Commission secretary, Kristie Drymon, had been serving in that position. But she quit after our dad filed some complaints of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) violations and she was one of those charged by the county prosecutor.
Yeah, there was an issue with her not being able to keep up with the FOIA information, so she resigned her spot. But they hired an outside person, Sarah Setzer, and she’s doing it now. Ms. Setzer actually asked me the other day if she could pay me to type up the minutes.
Pay you to type up the minutes?!
Yeah, because she has issues typing.
by Jeff Winkler, The Awl | Read more:
America the Anxious
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” — Eric Hoffer
As soon as an American baby is born, its parents enter into an implicit contractual obligation to answer any question about their hopes for their tiny offspring’s future with the words: “I don’t care, as long as he’s happy” (the mental suffix “at Harvard” must remain unspoken).
Happiness in America has become the overachiever’s ultimate trophy. A vicious trump card, it outranks professional achievement and social success, family, friendship and even love. Its invocation can deftly minimize others’ achievements (“Well, I suppose she has the perfect job and a gorgeous husband, but is she really happy?”) and take the shine off our own.
This obsessive, driven, relentless pursuit is a characteristically American struggle — the exhausting daily application of the Declaration of Independence. But at the same time this elusive MacGuffin is creating a nation of nervous wrecks. Despite being the richest nation on earth, the United States is, according to the World Health Organization, by a wide margin, also the most anxious, with nearly a third of Americans likely to suffer from an anxiety problem in their lifetime. America’s precocious levels of anxiety are not just happening in spite of the great national happiness rat race, but also perhaps, because of it.
As a Brit living in the United States, I am acutely aware of the cultural difference between attitudes to happiness here and at “home.” Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing when he wrote that “pursuit of happiness” line, a perfectly delivered slap in the face to his joy-shunning oppressors across the pond. The British are generally uncomfortable around the subject, and as a rule, don’t subscribe to the happy-ever-after. It’s not that we don’t want to be happy, it just seems somehow embarrassing to discuss it, and demeaning to chase it, like calling someone moments after a first date to ask them if they like you. (...)
There is something joyless about the whole shindig. I live in California, where the Great American Search for Happiness has its headquarters. The notice board of the cafe where I write offers a revolving loop of different paths to bliss: Maum Meditation, TransDance, Chod Training and, most oddly, the drinking of wolf colostrum. Customers jot down the phone numbers earnestly, although statistically they’d be better off joining the Republican Party.
The people taking part in “happiness pursuits,” as a rule, don’t seem very happy. At the one and only yoga class I attended, shortly after arriving in the United States, the tension and misery in the room were palpable. Which makes sense, because a person who was already feeling happy would be unlikely to waste the sensation in a sweaty room at the Y.M.C.A., voluntarily contorting into uncomfortable positions. The happy person would be more likely to be off doing something fun, like sitting in the park drinking.
As soon as an American baby is born, its parents enter into an implicit contractual obligation to answer any question about their hopes for their tiny offspring’s future with the words: “I don’t care, as long as he’s happy” (the mental suffix “at Harvard” must remain unspoken).Happiness in America has become the overachiever’s ultimate trophy. A vicious trump card, it outranks professional achievement and social success, family, friendship and even love. Its invocation can deftly minimize others’ achievements (“Well, I suppose she has the perfect job and a gorgeous husband, but is she really happy?”) and take the shine off our own.
This obsessive, driven, relentless pursuit is a characteristically American struggle — the exhausting daily application of the Declaration of Independence. But at the same time this elusive MacGuffin is creating a nation of nervous wrecks. Despite being the richest nation on earth, the United States is, according to the World Health Organization, by a wide margin, also the most anxious, with nearly a third of Americans likely to suffer from an anxiety problem in their lifetime. America’s precocious levels of anxiety are not just happening in spite of the great national happiness rat race, but also perhaps, because of it.
As a Brit living in the United States, I am acutely aware of the cultural difference between attitudes to happiness here and at “home.” Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing when he wrote that “pursuit of happiness” line, a perfectly delivered slap in the face to his joy-shunning oppressors across the pond. The British are generally uncomfortable around the subject, and as a rule, don’t subscribe to the happy-ever-after. It’s not that we don’t want to be happy, it just seems somehow embarrassing to discuss it, and demeaning to chase it, like calling someone moments after a first date to ask them if they like you. (...)
There is something joyless about the whole shindig. I live in California, where the Great American Search for Happiness has its headquarters. The notice board of the cafe where I write offers a revolving loop of different paths to bliss: Maum Meditation, TransDance, Chod Training and, most oddly, the drinking of wolf colostrum. Customers jot down the phone numbers earnestly, although statistically they’d be better off joining the Republican Party.
The people taking part in “happiness pursuits,” as a rule, don’t seem very happy. At the one and only yoga class I attended, shortly after arriving in the United States, the tension and misery in the room were palpable. Which makes sense, because a person who was already feeling happy would be unlikely to waste the sensation in a sweaty room at the Y.M.C.A., voluntarily contorting into uncomfortable positions. The happy person would be more likely to be off doing something fun, like sitting in the park drinking.
by Ruth Whippman, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Jim Stoten
Reinventing Ethics
What’s good and what’s bad? There are plenty of reasons to believe that human nature changes slowly, if at all — all’s still fair in love and war. For millennia, religious believers have attributed our nature to God’s image, as well as to God’s plan. In recent years, evolutionary psychologists peered directly at our forerunners on the savannahs of East Africa; if human beings change, we do so gradually over thousands of years. Given little or nothing new in the human firmament, traditional morality — the “goods” and “bads” as outlined in the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule — should suffice.
My view of the matter is quite different. As I see it, human beings and citizens in complex, modern democratic societies regularly confront situations in which traditional morality provides little if any guidance. Moreover, tenable views of “good” and “bad” that arose in the last few centuries are being radically challenged, most notably by the societal shifts spurred by digital media. If we are to have actions and solutions adequate to our era, we will need to create and experiment with fresh approaches to identifying the right course of action.
Let’s start with the Ten Commandments. We are enjoined to honor our parents, and to avoid murder, theft, adultery and dishonesty. Or consider the Golden Rule: “Do onto others. “ A moment’s reflection reveals that these commandments concern how we treat those nearby — we might say those 150 persons who, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, each of us has evolved to be able to know well. For most of history, and all of pre-history, our morality has been extended to our geographical neighbors — anyone else falls outside the framework of neighborly morality.
This characterization is largely true until we reach the modern era — the last few centuries, particularly in the West. The one dramatic exception is the brief period of the Greek city-state. Citizens of Athens pledged to work for the improvement and glory of the entire society. And in extending the gamut of responsibility, the Hippocratic oath of the Periclean era enjoined physicians to extend aid and avoid mistreatment of any person in need of medical attention. As explained a century ago by the German sociologist Max Weber, professionals were no longer simply humans relating to their neighbors. Rather, the doctor, the lawyer, the architect, the educator had taken on more specified and finely articulated roles, with characteristic rights and responsibilities. Now, the morality that we direct to those living in the neighborhood and the ethics that a responsible professional should direct to all who come within his or her ambit, whether friend, foe, or someone from outside one’s customary circle, are two quite different matters. (...)
Why should this matter? If my argument is correct, the professional deals every day with issues that cannot possibly be decided simply by consulting the Bible or some other traditional moral code. At which point should the journalist protect an anonymous source? Should a lawyer continue to defend a client whom she believes to be lying? Ought a medical scientist take research support when the funds come from a convicted felon or when subjects cannot give informed consent? Alas, traditional texts don’t provide reliable answers to these questions — they don’t even raise them. And yet, if professions are to disappear, should we simply answer these vexed questions by flipping a coin or by majority vote?
by Howard Gardner, NY Times | Read more:
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Oyster Run 2012
History of the Oyster Run (largest motorcycle gathering in the Pacific Northwest)
Photos: markk
May Doctors Help You to Die?
It is hereby declared that the public welfare requires a defined and safeguarded process by which an adult Massachusetts resident who has the capacity to make health care decisions and who has been determined by his or her attending and consulting physicians to be suffering from a terminal disease that will cause death within six months may obtain medication that the patient may self administer to end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner. It is further declared that the public welfare requires that such a process be entirely voluntary on the part of all participants, including the patient, his or her physicians, and any other health care provider or facility providing services or care to the patient.If this ballot initiative passes, it will be binding, and Massachusetts will join Oregon, which implemented a virtually identical statute in 1998, and Washington, which did the same in 2009, as the only states where voters approved this form of physician-assisted dying, sometimes called aid-in-dying. (These terms are favored by proponents over the older term, physician-assisted suicide, because they distinguish it from the typical suicide in which someone with a normal life expectancy chooses death over life. Here the patient is near death from natural causes anyway, and chooses the timing and manner of an inevitable death.) Montana, through a 2009 decision by its Supreme Court, not a voter referendum, also permits physician-assisted dying.
Euthanasia—the act of directly injecting medication to cause death rather than providing medication for the patient to take if he or she chooses—is also a form of assisted dying, but it is banned everywhere in the United States. It is also banned in Switzerland, where assisted dying is otherwise allowed. However, euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, where they make no moral distinction between the two forms of assisted dying, and euthanasia is favored because it’s easier and faster. In June, the British Columbia Supreme Court overturned the Canadian law against assisted dying.1 If that decision stands on appeal, Canada will likely join the Benelux countries in allowing both forms of assisted dying.
Before Quinlan, there wasn’t much explicit attention given to whether and how to bring about an earlier death in permanently unconscious patients, or in patients who, although conscious, were suffering unbearably at the end of life. In fact, in the 1960s, when I trained in medicine, dying was hardly mentioned in medical school or training programs, except as a failure of treatment. It was rarely spoken of to families, let alone patients, who were never to be denied hope for a recovery, no matter how dire the prognosis. Sometimes when patients were in obvious misery at the end of life, doctors would increase the dose of morphine, with the expectation that it would hasten death, but they usually didn’t consult with anyone about it (an order for a large dose of morphine could lead to trouble even in those days), and it was more a reflection of doctors’ compassion and courage than patients’ needs and desires.
There were a few, isolated concessions to the inevitability of death during this period. In 1957, Pope Pius XII held that there is no moral requirement for doctors or families to provide “extraordinary” medical treatment, by which he seemed to mean futile or extremely burdensome treatment. In 1968, a group of prominent physicians recommended that death be redefined to include brain death even while respiration and heartbeat continued, and that treatment could be withdrawn from such patients. Also in the 1960s, Dame Cicely Saunders introduced the British hospice movement to the United States, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her book, On Death and Dying, which argued for greater acceptance of death. Nevertheless, until the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, removing life-sustaining treatment, particularly artificial feeding, would generally have been considered tantamount to euthanasia, and simply was not done.
Nor was it nearly as urgent a question as it later became. Before the time of Quinlan, we simply didn’t have the technology to sustain life artificially for very long. In addition, there was another reason the right-to-die movement began about the time of Quinlan. As medicine became more specialized, of necessity it became a team endeavor, not a purely private matter between one physician and one patient. So a physician could not quietly increase the dose of morphine, as before. Instead, these sorts of decisions were removed from the bedside, discussed among team members, and became subject to ethical and legal oversight.
by Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Saturday, September 22, 2012
700BC-650 BCE
Assembled from fragments; the tridacna shell served as a container for cosmetics.
E Mediterranean-Phoenician
British Museum
Shrink to Fit
It also gave many New Yorkers a joltingly fresh perspective. For those who already consider themselves space-starved, quarters that are even more cramped seemed inconceivable. Yet to others, an apartment of that size sounded crazy-huge.
Consider Gab Stolarski, who happily renewed the lease for her West Village studio apartment— all 170 square feet of it.
As she welcomes a visitor to her fourth-floor walk-up, Ms. Stolarski, a manager in the digital sales group at Condé Nast, recites the stock reaction to her pinkie toehold in Manhattan: “ ‘Oh! Ohhh. It’s ... cute! And you have a bathroom, too!’ ”
Plus 35 pairs of shoes.
Although her charming aerie has a working fireplace and a courtyard view, here is what Ms. Stolarski’s apartment does not have: a couch; tchotchkes; specks of dirt; paperwork (“I’m 25,” she shrugs. “I’m a digital girl.”); food.
Yet the studio, which was represented by Prudential Douglas Elliman, perfectly matches her priorities. A clotheshorse who doesn’t cook, she stores sweaters, not soy sauce, in her kitchen cabinets. She covers her stove burners with a cutting board — not for serving cheese and crackers, but as a counter area to dump sunglasses and her purse du jour. More important, she lives in her favorite neighborhood, near transportation, and for a rent that is almost bearable: $1,745 a month (Manhattan one-bedroom rents have inched over $3,300). As for entertaining guests? Like many others with no space to spare, she usually meets friends at bars and restaurants.
“The city as living room is key,” said Susanne Schindler, an architect with Team R8, a design group that contributed to Making Room, an initiative of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, which explores designs for diverse housing options, including micro-units.
by Jan Hoffman, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Marilynn K. Yee
How Much Tech Can One City Take?
Lee quickly made an appointment with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to see how San Francisco could hold on to the social media giant. Costolo told the mayor that Twitter was planning to double the size of its local workforce over the next year, from about 450 employees to 1,000. But the city’s policies penalized job growth by taxing a company’s payroll, the Twitter chief said. If San Francisco wanted to attract fast-growing digital companies like his, city hall would have to reform its business-tax structure.
For Lee, the Costolo meeting would prove to be a wake-up call. Little in the mayor’s biography (he’s the son of a Chinese restaurant cook, and a former tenants’ rights agitator) suggested that he would become a close friend of the city’s dominant business interests. But ever since his Twitter awakening, Lee has been moving quickly to align his administration with the booming technology industry, shrugging off complaints from the city’s powerful progressives that he’s gotten too cozy with tech moguls, such as investor Ron Conway. The mayor’s proposal to shift business taxes from a payroll-based plan to one based on gross receipts will be on the November ballot, with wide backing from the Board of Supervisors, labor unions, and, of course, Conway. Progressive gadfly Aaron Peskin tapped a deep well of distrust on the left last month when he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “The Koch brothers are trying to buy the president of the United States, and Ron Conway has bought himself a mayor.”
Lee, unperturbed by the flak on his left, now devotes one afternoon each week to a gathering he calls "Tech Tuesday"—visiting one of the many technology companies that are flocking to the city and discussing with the executives and engineers their wishlists for San Francisco. He has sat down with the geek elite at more than 20 companies so far, including Yelp, Yammer, Autodesk, and Zendesk. The firms’ representatives tell Lee what they like about the city—the bike lanes, the arts, the cultural diversity, the different languages you hear on the streets. And then they tell him what they don’t like—the homelessness, the poor public schools, the crime.
In spite of the obvious urban warts, the word is out: San Francisco is the world’s leading tech paradise. At a rate eclipsing the dot-com boom of the 1990s, tech companies are setting up shop in the city by the hundreds, drawn by its beauty and livability, as well as the deep pool of engineering talent here and, yes, city hall’s increasingly tech-oriented policies.
Young entrepreneurs from as far away as Denmark, Singapore, and France can be seen with real estate agents in tow, roaming through converted South of Market lofts still vacant from when the previous bubble burst more than a decade ago. The city is currently home to more than 1,700 tech firms, which employ 44,000 workers, up a whopping 30 percent from just two years ago. And San Francisco has been the nation’s top magnet for venture capital funding for three years in a row. Consequently, the distinction between Silicon Valley and San Francisco has all but disappeared. It is us, and we are it.
The city is clearly benefiting from this new mind meld. San Francisco’s 7.6 percent unemployment rate handily beats the state’s 10.9 percent rate, and it’s one of the few counties in California that has experienced significant property-tax growth during the economic crisis, driven largely by the hot real estate market in the tech-heavy SoMa area. The new tech boom has helped add $6 billion to the city’s tax rolls over the past year—an increase of more than 4 percent over the previous fiscal year. There’s a sense of pride and excitement in the air, a feeling that—once again—we’re the ones creating the technologies that are driving the digital era. San Francisco is quite literally changing the world.
But despite all this, there is trouble in paradise. The unique urban features that have made San Francisco so appealing to a new generation of digital workers—its artistic ferment, its social diversity, its trailblazing progressive consciousness—are deteriorating, driven out of the city by the tech boom itself, and the rising real estate prices that go with it. Rents are soaring: Units in one Mission district condominium complex recently sold for a record $900 per square foot. And single-family homes in Noe Valley, Bernal Heights, and other attractive city neighborhoods are selling for as much as 40 percent above the asking price. Again and again, you hear of teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, artists, hotel and restaurant workers, and others with no stake in the new digital gold rush being squeezed out of the city.
And it’s not just about housing. Many San Franciscans don’t feel as if they’re benefiting from the boom in any way. While 23-year-olds are becoming instant millionaires and the rest of the digital technocracy seek out gourmet restaurants and artisanal bars, a good portion of the city watches from the sidelines, feeling left out and irrelevant. Dot-com decadence is once again creeping into the city of St. Francis, and the tensions between those who own a piece of its future and those who don’t are growing by the day.
In light of this, the time has come for a serious reckoning—for Mayor Lee, for the tech cognoscenti, and for the rest of the populace. In short, do we wish to be a city of enlightenment, or a city of apps? Many of those who have lived in San Francisco the longest and care for it the most are worried that their charmed oasis is becoming a dangerously one-dimensional company town—a techie’s Los Angeles, a VC’s D.C. If San Francisco is swallowed whole by the digital elite, many city lovers fear, the once-lush urban landscape will become as flat as a computer screen.
by David Talbot, San Francisco Magazine | Read more:
Photography by Peter Belange
Still Too Pricey
Facebook has a business model in need of a radical change and a still-rich $61 billion market value. What's not to "like"? Plenty.
Facebook's 40% plunge from its initial-public-offering price of $38 in May has millions of investors asking a single question: Is the stock a buy? The short answer is "No." After a recent rally, to $23 from a low of $17.55, the stock trades at high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows.
The rapid shift in Facebook's user base to mobile platforms—more than half of users now access the site on smartphones and tablets—appears to have caught the company by surprise. Facebook (ticker: FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg must find a way to monetize its mobile traffic because usage on traditional PCs, where the company makes virtually all of its money, is declining in its large and established markets. That trend isn't likely to change. (...)
The bull case for Facebook is that Zuckerberg & Co. will find creative ways to generate huge revenue from its 955 million monthly active users, be it from mobile and desktop advertising, e-commerce, search, online-game payments, or sources that have yet to emerge. Pay no attention to depressed current earnings, the argument goes. Facebook is just getting started.
Facebook's 40% plunge from its initial-public-offering price of $38 in May has millions of investors asking a single question: Is the stock a buy? The short answer is "No." After a recent rally, to $23 from a low of $17.55, the stock trades at high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows.The rapid shift in Facebook's user base to mobile platforms—more than half of users now access the site on smartphones and tablets—appears to have caught the company by surprise. Facebook (ticker: FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg must find a way to monetize its mobile traffic because usage on traditional PCs, where the company makes virtually all of its money, is declining in its large and established markets. That trend isn't likely to change. (...)
The bull case for Facebook is that Zuckerberg & Co. will find creative ways to generate huge revenue from its 955 million monthly active users, be it from mobile and desktop advertising, e-commerce, search, online-game payments, or sources that have yet to emerge. Pay no attention to depressed current earnings, the argument goes. Facebook is just getting started.
Facebook now gets $5 annually in revenue per user. That could easily double or triple in the next five years, bulls say. In a recent interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Zuckerberg said, "It's easy to underestimate how fundamentally good mobile is for us." His argument, coming after Facebook's brand-damaging IPO fiasco and a halving of the stock, was something only a mother, or a true believer, could love. This year Facebook is expected to get 5% of its revenue from mobile. "Literally six months ago we didn't run a single ad on mobile," Zuckerberg said. Facebook executives declined to speak with Barron's.
"Anyone who owns Facebook should be exceptionally troubled that they're still trying to 'figure out' mobile monetization and had to lay out $1 billion for Instagram because some start-up had figured out mobile pictures better than Facebook," says one institutional investor, referring to Facebook's April deal for two-year-old Instagram, whose smartphone app for mobile photo-sharing became a big hit (and at the time had yet to generate a nickel in revenue).
"Anyone who owns Facebook should be exceptionally troubled that they're still trying to 'figure out' mobile monetization and had to lay out $1 billion for Instagram because some start-up had figured out mobile pictures better than Facebook," says one institutional investor, referring to Facebook's April deal for two-year-old Instagram, whose smartphone app for mobile photo-sharing became a big hit (and at the time had yet to generate a nickel in revenue).
by Andrew Bary, Barrons | Read more:
Anthropology of Tailgating
To the untrained eye, these game-day rituals appear to be little more than a wild party, a hedonistic excuse to get loaded and eat barbecue. Not at all. They are, according to Notre Dame anthropologist John Sherry, bustling microcosms of society where self-regulatory neighborhoods foster inter-generational community, nurture tradition and build the team’s brand.
Sherry didn’t always feel this way. There was a time when he considered tailgating a boisterous nuisance, little more than a gauntlet of unrelated and unruly celebrations to be run if he were to reach his seat in Notre Dame Stadium. But then he had an epiphany: What if there was meaning to the madness?
“One day I slowed down and paid attention to things that were going on that weren’t individual celebrations,” he said of research presented in A Cultural Analysis of Tailgating. “It was much more nuanced that I had thought before.”
Sherry consulted the existing literature on the subject and found bupkis. Most studies on tailgating come to Onion-esque conclusions like “tailgating leads to drunkenness” or examine the environmental impact(.pdf) of all that trash. Sherry looked deeper into tailgating and saw a whole lot of consumption akin to that of, say, ancient harvest festivals. He recruited colleague Tonya Bradford, trained a few research assistants and started attending tailgate parties and interviewing fans to learn more.
Notre Dame was a convenient place to start, given its rich football tradition. But Sherry and Co. hit the road too, attending Irish away games and checking the scene at Big Ten Conference schools. They talked to fans of every stripe, from alumni with six-figure RVs to students. And they discovered what every true football fan eventually discovers.
“What we really found was a real active and orchestrated effort in community building,” said Sherry. “People have tailgated in the same place for years, they have tailgated through generations, they have encountered strangers who have passed through and adopted them to their families and became fast friends. They have created neighborhoods.”
This much was obvious Saturday at the University of Utah-Brigham Young University game I attended. The parking lot around Eccles Stadium was thick with trucks and trailers and RVs, the air was thick with the smell of cooking meat. The lot was divided into “streets” and “neighborhoods” populated by fans who have in many cases known each other for years.
by Beth Carter, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Mike Roemer/Associated Press
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