Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Tap The Healing Power of Poop
The procedure of transferring stool to a patient—technically called fecal microbiota transplantation—was first performed in the United States in 1958 to treat an intractable case of C. difficile colitis, a gastrointestinal condition caused when the balance of microbes in the gut—called the microbiome—is destabilized or destroyed. The goal was to banish C. difficile by overpowering it with healthy microbes so that balance could be restored. The experiment worked, and last year a review of 317 patients treated by 27 different research groups found an astounding 92 percent cure rate from this unusual therapy.
Now a group of physicians have designed the fecal treatment’s first double-blind trial, in which neither patient nor researcher knows whether a placebo or a healthy microbiome is being delivered to the ailing gut. Before that can happen, though, the FDA needs to approve the use of healthy donor stool as an “investigational new drug.” Then the National Institutes of Health must provide funding.
Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist in Providence, Rhode Island, who is helping design the trial, says the first patient she treated with a fecal transplant was a premed student in 2008 who was completely debilitated by six painful months of C. difficile colitis. “I tried every standard regimen of treatment. Nothing worked,” Kelly says. After the patient received a transplant of her live-in boyfriend’s stool, she was cured. “When I saw her at follow-up, she looked fantastic,” Kelly says, “smiling and completely symptom free. She told me she’d felt better the same day as the transplant. I’ve done 72 of these now, and I hear that again and again.”
Growing interest in the unconventional therapy is due in part to the fact that C. difficile colitis cases have tripled in the past decade and now afflict more than half a million people a year. “C. difficile colitis is a terrible problem, and fecal transplant results are astounding,” says Lawrence J. Brandt, emeritus chief of gastroenterology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. He is a proponent of fecal transplant therapy as a primary treatment for C. difficile, rather than as a last resort.
by Jill Neimark, Discover | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?
Still, the question of how “big” Grizzly Bear are—where they fall on the long scale between celebrity megastars and those unwashed touring-in-vans-for-the-love-of-it indie rockers whose days consist of, as Droste remembers it, “cars breaking down, sleeping on floors, being allergic to the cat in someone’s house, making literally no money, playing in a diner, having ten people show up, being like Why are we doing this?, eating beef jerky from the gas station for protein”—is a funny and unsettled one, and its answer might depend on your perspective. (...)
For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. “People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,” says Droste. “Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.” Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with “a nice little ‘Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.’ ” They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (“Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage”), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. “I just think it’s inappropriate,” says Droste. “Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.”
Rock bands are generally obligated to express profound gratitude for any kind of success, and Grizzly Bear’s seems thoroughly genuine. They will also acknowledge that it’s “a weird life,” that it’s not always easy, that it requires a mix of sacrifice and raw compulsion and rigorous overhead-cutting, and that they sometimes wonder what they’d do if the band fell apart. Chris Bear is just now, for the first time, ceasing to handle management of their tours, though he still can explain the band’s accounting in detail, sounding almost guilty about any expenses that rise above a monastic level: The occasional hotel-room rental, he says, is so they can take showers, and the sound and lighting engineers are inarguable necessities. (“You can’t roll into Radio City and be like, ‘Yeah, just plug in my acoustic guitar and turn it up.’ ”) He and Droste go out of their way to stay in the top tier of an airline rewards program for the upgrades on long tour flights. (“I’m six-four,” says Droste, “and I don’t want to pay for business class.”) Sit down with the four of them, and you get the overall sense that the band’s high profile has taken them from ordinary early-twenties NYU grads—working as a temp, a caterer, a coffee-shop employee, and “the guy who edits out the coughs” in audio documentaries—to the early-thirties proprietors of a risky small business: very busy, stuck somewhere between “scraping by” and “comfortable enough,” and unsure how they’d ever manage to do things like support families or pay for any children’s educations, especially given the slim chances that this business will exist twenty or even ten years from now. “If your livelihood is in songwriting, you never know when that’s just gonna stop,” says Rossen. Now that they’ve reached success, they seem to wonder about stability. “There’s people that know they make X dollars a year, and that’s not going to change,” says Bear. “Or if anything, they’ll get a raise. That seems like a pretty reasonable setup, compared to maybe having one really good year, and then who knows what the future is.”
by Nitsuh Abebe, Vulture | Read more:
(Con) Fusion Centers
One of the nation’s biggest domestic counterterrorism programs has failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence, according to Congressional investigators.
Their scathing report, to be released Wednesday, looked at problems in regional intelligence-gathering offices known as “fusion centers” that are financed by the Department of Homeland Security and created jointly with state and local law enforcement agencies.
The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
The investigators reviewed 610 reports produced by the centers over 13 months in 2009 and 2010. Of these, the report said, 188 were never published for use within the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies. Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete. And some of the reports appeared to be based on previously published information or facts that had long since been reported through the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (...)
The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist. (...)
The report on the dysfunctional nature of the fusion centers makes clear that in the decade since the department was created, Homeland Security has not carved out a clear counterterror mission that does not overlap with those of other agencies.
Top officials of the Homeland Security Department have known about the problems for years, but hid an internal department report on the program’s flaws from Congress while continuing to tell lawmakers and the public that the fusion centers were highly valuable and that they formed the centerpiece of Homeland Security’s counter-terrorism efforts. A 2010 internal assessment by the department discovered, for instance, that four of its claimed 72 fusion centers did not exist, even as department officials kept using the 72 figure publicly with Congress.
Homeland Security officials disputed the findings of the Senate investigators. Matthew Chandler, a department spokesman, said the Senate report “is out of date, inaccurate and misleading.” He said the investigators “refused to review relevant data, including important intelligence information pertinent to their findings.”
When it was created, the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to function as a central clearinghouse for terrorism-related intelligence, to solve what was supposed to be one of the big problems identified in the government’s failure to prevent 9/11 — a lack of intelligence sharing between the F.B.I., the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies.
But almost immediately, the George W. Bush administration created other organizations to do much the same thing. Today, the central clearinghouse is the National Counterterrorism Center, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Department officials soon began angling to find something else to do. They hit on the idea of taking charge of intelligence sharing between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies, and by 2006, fusion centers were being set up across the country.
Their scathing report, to be released Wednesday, looked at problems in regional intelligence-gathering offices known as “fusion centers” that are financed by the Department of Homeland Security and created jointly with state and local law enforcement agencies.
The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
The investigators reviewed 610 reports produced by the centers over 13 months in 2009 and 2010. Of these, the report said, 188 were never published for use within the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies. Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete. And some of the reports appeared to be based on previously published information or facts that had long since been reported through the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (...)
The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist. (...)
The report on the dysfunctional nature of the fusion centers makes clear that in the decade since the department was created, Homeland Security has not carved out a clear counterterror mission that does not overlap with those of other agencies.
Top officials of the Homeland Security Department have known about the problems for years, but hid an internal department report on the program’s flaws from Congress while continuing to tell lawmakers and the public that the fusion centers were highly valuable and that they formed the centerpiece of Homeland Security’s counter-terrorism efforts. A 2010 internal assessment by the department discovered, for instance, that four of its claimed 72 fusion centers did not exist, even as department officials kept using the 72 figure publicly with Congress.
Homeland Security officials disputed the findings of the Senate investigators. Matthew Chandler, a department spokesman, said the Senate report “is out of date, inaccurate and misleading.” He said the investigators “refused to review relevant data, including important intelligence information pertinent to their findings.”
When it was created, the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to function as a central clearinghouse for terrorism-related intelligence, to solve what was supposed to be one of the big problems identified in the government’s failure to prevent 9/11 — a lack of intelligence sharing between the F.B.I., the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies.
But almost immediately, the George W. Bush administration created other organizations to do much the same thing. Today, the central clearinghouse is the National Counterterrorism Center, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Department officials soon began angling to find something else to do. They hit on the idea of taking charge of intelligence sharing between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies, and by 2006, fusion centers were being set up across the country.
by James Risen, NY Times | Read more:
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Buy, Buy Love: In Search of Modern Mail-Order Brides
It's a sweat-through-your-statement-shirt Saturday afternoon in Medellín, Colombia—the former murder capital of the world. Dave, a stocky ex-nightclub manager from Liverpool, England, is preaching to a crowded bus of single men. They've traveled from Europe, Australia, and the United States to meet single women, maybe even marry them. Dave is the dating coach at AmoLatina, a subsidiary of Anastasia International, an international online dating portal that includes AnastasiaDate.com, AmoLatina.com, AsianBeauties.com, and AfricaBeauties.com. Once a romance-tour client himself, Dave's all lovable swagger and rogue British charm. It's easy to see why the men around me have bought into him and his power tips.
We're en route to a dating party organized by AmoLatina. Our minibus peels off a busy highway and into the parking lot next to an unassuming club called Dulce Jesús Mio. We head inside and take in the Latin-village decor that's oddly punctuated with wall-to-wall Christmas lights and large, grinning porcelain pigs. It looks like the kind of place that celebrates New Year's every night. (And every night at midnight, it does.)
The music starts. Reggaeton—a fusion of Latin hip-hop, dancehall, and salsa—echoes through Medellín no matter where you go. Its pulse is the hypnotic "dem bow" beat: a mesmerizing pattern that never ceases.
Women begin arriving in groups of three and four, spilling out of bright yellow taxis. We see glimpses of halter tops and jeans, outfits keenly hugging voluptuous figures. The youngest, smiles lined with braces, are in their early twenties. The oldest look to be in their mid-forties and strut toward the club with less giggle, more purpose. Photographers have been hired to capture the women as they enter the club, blinding flashes lighting up their faces in front of an AmoLatina sponsor board, which reads: bringing the world together.
The phenomenal growth of online dating over the past two decades shows no signs of slowing. It has skyrocketed from a curiosity in the late 1990s to a $2 billion powerhouse in 2011. Anastasia International, most famous for arranging meetings with Russian women, was founded in 1993 and has more than 240 employees, working in offices from Maine to Moscow to Medillín. They run regional websites in Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia. The company boasts that nearly one in five of its customers ends up either married or in a "lasting relationship" after attending one of its Eastern European romance tours. It also claims that the number of men joining has more than quadrupled since 2005—and that sign-ups by Russian, Ukrainian, and Latin American women have tripled.
Here's how it works on AmoLatina: Select one of 27 countries (the parent company works with 113 nations in total) from a drop-down menu, then identify the traits you would like in your ideal partner: age, height, weight, hair color, eye color, and even English-speaking skills (which range from "fluent" to "beginner"). If a profile piques your curiosity, you pay for an online introduction. Fees range, based on whether you want to send translated messages to the women, have roses delivered to their doorstep, or go on a guided tour in their hometown to meet them. Of course, you can always forgo formalities and book a tour without doing any preliminary browsing. Most customers travel to meet as many women as possible in one particular city.The participants on this trip paid $1,595 for a package that includes accommodations at a four-star hotel (the Hotel Dann Carlton Belfort Medellín), in-house translators, and access to hordes of women at two "socials." The central office of the romance tour is housed in a spacious hotel hospitality suite, with open windows overlooking downtown. This is where clients set up dates with women they've spotted on the website or at a social.
The guys on my trip range from 26 to sixty-something. Aggie, a hulking, cheery real-estate executive from Los Angeles, appears to be about 30. He's already befriended Mark, a six-foot-five undertaker from Boston. They make for a boisterous duo. Steve, from Omaha, is a grandfather and a widower. Joe, a middle-aged divorcé from Boston, works at one of the world's biggest tech companies and resembles Jon Lovitz—right down to the billowy polo he's wearing. Joe is brash and self-deprecating but softens when he talks about meeting a potential partner. Many of the men on tour in Medellín have experienced heartbreak, betrayal, and loneliness. Some pine for a wife and children. A minority are "players" who expect a tangible return on their investment. So says Dave, who confesses to taking a group of men to a strip club—which doubled as a brothel—in Bogotá a week earlier.
Who are the women, then? Quite a few come from the poorer parts of Medellín—like Comuna 13 and La Iguana—and many are single mothers. "The girls want to get out of the country," says Howard, a 57-year-old agricultural entrepreneur I met on the plane and who, coincidentally, married a Colombian woman a decade ago (though not on a matchmaking tour). Having traveled regularly from San Diego to Colombia to court his wife, Howard had the opportunity to see the tours evolve over the years. "They have looks, they're beautiful," he says. "But if they hit 25, 26 . . . the boat has left the dock. They're too old for Colombian guys." For these gals, the appeal is simple: free drinks, free food, and the chance to meet a foreigner serious enough about love to pay for it. Throughout my trip, several young women would complain about Colombia's notoriously unfaithful men.
by Adam Baidawi, Details | Read more:
Photos: Adam Baidawi
Secrets of the Phallus
The curious thing about the evolution of the human penis is that, for something that differs so obviously in shape and size from that of our closest living relatives, only in the past few years have researchers begun to study it in any detail. The reason for this neglect isn’t clear, though the most probable reason is because of its intrinsic snicker factor or, related to this, the likelihood of its stirring up uncomfortable puritanical sentiments. It takes a special type of psychological scientist to tell the little old lady sitting next to him on a flight to Denver that he studies how people use their penises when she asks what he does for a living. But I think labeling it as a “crude” or “disgusting” area of study reveals more about the critic than it does the researcher. And if you think there’s only one way to use your penis, that it’s merely an instrument of internal fertilization that doesn’t require further thought, or that size doesn’t matter, well, that just goes to show how much you can learn from Gallup’s research findings.
Gallup’s approach to studying the design of the human penis is a perfect example of of “reverse-engineering” as it’s used in the field of evolutionary psychology. This is a logico-deductive investigative technique for uncovering the adaptive purpose or function of existing (or “extant”) physical traits, psychological processes, or cognitive biases. That is to say, if you start with what you see today—in this case, the oddly shaped penis, with its bulbous glans (the “head” in common parlance), its long, rigid shaft, and the coronal ridge that forms a sort of umbrella-lip between these two parts—and work your way backward regarding how it came to look like that, the reverse-engineer is able to posit a set of function-based hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory. In the present case, we’re talking about penises, but the logic of reverse-engineering can be applied to just about anything organic, from the shape of our incisors, to the opposability of our thumbs, to the arch of our eyebrows. For the evolutionary psychologist, the pressing questions are, essentially, “why is it like that?” and “what is that for?” The answer isn’t always that it’s a biological adaptation—that it solved some evolutionary problem and therefore gave our ancestors a competitive edge in terms of their reproductive success. Sometimes a trait is just a “by-product” of other adaptations. Blood isn’t red, for example, because red worked better than green or yellow or blue, but only because it contains the red hemoglobin protein, which happens to be an excellent transporter of oxygen and carbon dioxide. But in the case of the human penis, it appears there’s a genuine adaptive reason that it looks the way it does.
by Jesse Bering, Scientific American | Read more:
This Is the Way Facebook Ends
And for the past eight years, Facebook has been the central neural network of the Internet’s link-sharing brain. But as the site has grown, so have our needs. Now that the company’s public, it’s crunch time, and the skeptics and haters are lining up to talk about how it might all end. One thing’s for certain: whether it’s a bang or a whimper, Facebook is not forever. How could it collapse? Let me count the ways.
Since Facebook’s inception, Mark Zuckerberg has had an uncanny knack for maintaining the site’s exceptional growth, despite royally pissing off the majority of its users with shady privacy practices, monetization strategies like the Beacon fiasco, and of course, its latest incarnation, Timeline. And yet, despite all the user resentment, we’re apparently using the site more than ever before. It’s this kind of fortitude in the face of user frustration that has led some to compare Zuckerberg’s forceful genius to that of Steve Jobs.
But while Jobs always had his doubters, vocal critics, and fair share of questionable philosophies, he commanded the kind of respect that’s made Mac fanboys some of the most annoying self-described geeks around the world. His death was felt internationally, as the world mourned the passing of its greatest tech rockstar.
Zuck doesn’t have the same kind of cult following. He’s been ridiculed all over the Internet and in a million-dollar Hollywood movie. Many simply don’t trust him. Beyond the anodyne hacking talk and his “keep shipping” motto, oracle readers have had to rely on chat transcripts from years of legal cases to learn about his thinking and intentions (for instance, that he once thought of his users as “dumb fucks.")
As net neutrality guru Tim Wu noted, Facebook has a lot of bad karma. “No one really loves the company,” he tweeted the other day. “We just feel stuck with it.” Really, we’re waiting for a good enough reason. At some point, Zuckerberg will push too hard — a new setting you can’t turn off, a “frictionless” feature that shares too much, a product that simply pisses you off too hard — and users will ragequit for good. The company’s controversial IPO and the simultaneous pressure to build up ad revenue will only accelerate this process.
At some point, Zuckerberg will push too hard, and users will ragequit for good
Of course, people have been calling for this for quite some time (almost with every new abrasive change to the site), but no true revolution has materialized. Thanks to the network effect, sheer inertia, and the lack of a compelling alternative, Facebook remains top dog. Our often-surprising threshold for pain doesn’t help, but it is finite. We are always potentially one bad update away from the tipping point. We’ve seen the internet rally together before and Facebook’s track record makes it easy to hate.
Before Facebook there was Friendster. Plus MySpace, Yahoo, and even Compuserve, among countless others. The idea for Facebook, however brilliantly executed, wasn’t necessarily built on some revolutionary, genius idea. It was one of many social networking sites to emerge around campuses in 2004, and it happened to be the thing that everyone started using. Like many success stories of the past, the thing that Facebook nailed was timing.
Facebook arrived at the advent of Web 2.0. Broadband reached the masses and the Internet was going mainstream. Photos that once took agonizing minutes to load on our noisy dial-up connections could now be shared near instantaneously with our dirt cheap digital cameras. The arrival of new HTML standards meant that the new web wasn’t just prettier, it was highly functional. Finally, the world was ready for a social network. Suddenly, Facebook became the coolest party in town.
Of course, people have been calling for this for quite some time (almost with every new abrasive change to the site), but no true revolution has materialized. Thanks to the network effect, sheer inertia, and the lack of a compelling alternative, Facebook remains top dog. Our often-surprising threshold for pain doesn’t help, but it is finite. We are always potentially one bad update away from the tipping point. We’ve seen the internet rally together before and Facebook’s track record makes it easy to hate.
Before Facebook there was Friendster. Plus MySpace, Yahoo, and even Compuserve, among countless others. The idea for Facebook, however brilliantly executed, wasn’t necessarily built on some revolutionary, genius idea. It was one of many social networking sites to emerge around campuses in 2004, and it happened to be the thing that everyone started using. Like many success stories of the past, the thing that Facebook nailed was timing.
Facebook arrived at the advent of Web 2.0. Broadband reached the masses and the Internet was going mainstream. Photos that once took agonizing minutes to load on our noisy dial-up connections could now be shared near instantaneously with our dirt cheap digital cameras. The arrival of new HTML standards meant that the new web wasn’t just prettier, it was highly functional. Finally, the world was ready for a social network. Suddenly, Facebook became the coolest party in town.
by Alec_Liu, Motherboard | Read more:
Why There Needs to Be a Real (Grad) School of Rock
There is nothing quite like being a young rock musician walking into a good recording studio for the first time, with a record contract in your backpack, surveying the machinery. The towers of digital and analog sound-effect consoles, with their glowing gauges and blinking lights, they're here for you—paid for by the label, available to you because you cut a basement demo that made people see dollar signs. Over the hum of the amplifiers you can almost hear the whir of the industry, the interns flirting, the promotion person on the phone with the terrestrial radio person, the booking agent negotiating with club managers in far-flung college towns. It's an apparatus built to make money but also to bring your songs to teenagers and twentysomethings who are like you, who scour the Internet and the Staff Picks rack for new music that will illuminate the sublime in desperate crushes and everyday despair.
From there, things tend to get more complicated. In the case of the band I was in during my mid-20s, we quickly figured out that we didn't have anywhere near enough time to lay down a good debut album in the recording schedule afforded us, especially given the greenness of our line-up and material. A few days after those transcendent first moments in the studio, the producer confirmed our worst suspicions: Because we had a song that had been gathering online buzz and sounded like a potential hit, he explained, the label had squeezed us into an unrealistic timeframe in hopes of introducing the song to college radio before the end of the school year. "They did it to you," he said, "they've done it to other bands, and they'll probably do it to some more." We panicked, blazing through each song as efficiently as possible.
I was in debt and couldn't stomach becoming homeless to promote an album that embarrassed me, so before we went on tour, I quit the band, took a day job, and went back to being a writer. The album didn't sell very well, but our "hit" was discovered by advertisers. The song in question, "Hey Now Now,"was vaguely suicidal, written by our singer as he emerged from a black depression. The chorus went, "Hey now now/We're going down, down/And we'll ride the bus there/Pay the bus fare." But everybody misheard "We're going down, down" as "We're going downtown," and it was featured in a Pepsi commercial broadcast from South America to Europe to the Middle East, in which ethnically indeterminate rockers played the song in a practice space while the Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho dribbled in an alley. Long after the band fell apart, it turned up again in an ad for Multi-Grain Pringles. Our legacy, in the end, was an 18-second fragment of one tune. We walked into the studio determined to make complex, aesthetically cohesive albums like our heroes in Arcade Fire; we wound up shills for snack food.
What my band needed was an Iowa Writers' Workshops for rock musicians, a Master of Fine Arts program at a university where respected veterans helped us learn to write good songs and perform them well. Such programs would establish a much-needed period of germination beyond the reach of commerce, in which young rock musicians could meet, form bands, and build a repertoire slowly, receiving feedback from seasoned rock musicians who don't have a pecuniary stake in their work. Such programs would cultivate good popular music by placing young musicians in an environment where aesthetic integrity is valued and financial strife held at bay. (...)
A rock and roll grad school wouldn't save rock musicians from the difficulties of life on the road or from the byzantine practices of an industry desperate to find new sources of revenue after seeing its sales decline from $14 billion a year to $7 billion in the age of file-sharing. But it would give them a period of time in which to find collaborators, give one another feedback, get good, discover who they are as artists, and acquire mentors before they're exploited or pressured to sell out. It wouldn't spare musicians hardship, but it would help them make better music.
When it was founded in 1936, the Iowa Writers' Workshop was a weird proposition; it brought an unscholarly pursuit into an academic setting. Writers were supposed to be renegades who refined their intuitive and unteachable art in bars and cafes. They were regarded, in other words, much the same way rock musicians are regarded now. But the Workshop went on to graduate 17 Pulitzer Prize winners, and there are now roughly 250 MFA programs in creative writing. Some are cash cows for universities. Some, like Iowa, are not unlike charitable organizations, in that they pay their students stipends to write whatever they want or give them work teaching undergrads.
Rock music should be wild, unprofessional, spontaneous, indifferent to convention—it shouldn't feel like a craft honed in school. But neither should literature, and many of the most radically original writers in recent American letters have passed through the MFA system: Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson went to Iowa, David Foster Wallace went to the program at the University of Arizona, George Saunders to the one at Syracuse, Karen Russell to the one at Columbia. If there are any romantic punk rockers out there concerned that MFA programs would inhibit budding Lou Reeds from drinking too much and sleeping around and doing drugs, or otherwise constrain their outré behavior, this Iowa graduate is here to reassure them they do not.
Rock music should be wild, unprofessional, spontaneous, indifferent to convention—it shouldn't feel like a craft honed in school. But neither should literature, and many of the most radically original writers in recent American letters have passed through the MFA system: Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson went to Iowa, David Foster Wallace went to the program at the University of Arizona, George Saunders to the one at Syracuse, Karen Russell to the one at Columbia. If there are any romantic punk rockers out there concerned that MFA programs would inhibit budding Lou Reeds from drinking too much and sleeping around and doing drugs, or otherwise constrain their outré behavior, this Iowa graduate is here to reassure them they do not.
by Benjamin Nugent, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Paramount
Monday, October 1, 2012
Hey, @SeattlePD: What’s the Latest?
But does “local” mean the same thing in the disembodied chatter of social media? The Seattle Police Department, which presides over one of the nation’s more tech-savvy — if not saturated — cities, is diving in to find out, in a project that began last week with 51 hyper-local neighborhood Twitter accounts providing moment-to-moment crime reports.
The project, called Tweets-by-beat, is the most ambitious effort of its kind in the nation, authorities in law enforcement and social media say, transforming the pen and ink of the old police blotter into the bits and bytes of the digital age. It allows residents — including, presumably, criminals — to know in almost real time about many of the large and small transgressions, crises, emergencies and downright weirdness in their neighborhoods.
Say you live on Olive Way east of downtown. There was an “intoxicated person” on your street at 3:31 a.m. Monday, so the neighborhood report said, as well as a “mental complaint,” unspecified and mysterious, nearby at 9:30 a.m. Sunday was busy for property crime on the beat, with two burglaries and a shoplifting case, along with a grab bag of noise and disturbance complaints, accident investigations and a several reports of “suspicious vehicles.”
“More and more people want to know what’s going on on their piece of the rock,” said the chief of police, John Diaz. “They want to specifically know what’s going on in the areas around their home, around their work, where their children might be going to school. This is just a different way we could put out as much information as possible as quickly as possible.”
Not everything that happens in a neighborhood will automatically pop up in 140 characters or fewer. Sex crimes were excluded, on the theory that Web attention could discourage people from reporting a rape or sexual assault, and domestic violence cases will remain off the Twitter list as well for similar reasons. Drawing attention to a private matter and alerting neighbors, department officials said, could make things worse for the victim.
The reports are also structured with an automatic one-hour delay, aimed at preventing people from learning about an investigation in progress and swarming over to gawk and perhaps interfere.
“This is trailblazing stuff,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “It shows a willingness I haven’t seen in large supply to really affirmatively make available, warts and all, a clear picture to people of what’s going on.”
But Professor O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor, said he thought there could be unintended consequences. Increased awareness of local crime, he said, could lead people to a greater feeling of vulnerability or to the conclusion that the police are not resolving the local crime problem — even if it is a problem they might not have been aware of had the beat-tweet not informed them.
by Kirk Johnson, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Michael Hanson
Leap of Faith
In the context of historical evidence and outcomes, present market conditions give us no choice but to remain highly defensive. Valuations remain rich on the basis of normalized earnings (which are better correlated with subsequent returns than numerous popular alternatives based on forward operating earnings, the Fed Model and the like). Investor sentiment is overcrowded on the bullish side even as corporate insiders are liquidating at a rate of eight shares sold for every share purchased – a surge that Investors Intelligence describes as a “panic.” Market conditions remain steeply overbought on an intermediate and long-term basis, with the S&P 500 still near its upper Bollinger bands (two standard deviations above the 20-period moving average) on weekly and monthly resolutions. We continue to observe wide divergences in market action, from century-old criteria such as the weakness in transports versus industrials (which suggests an unwanted buildup of inventories) to more subtle divergences and signs of exhaustion in market internals.
Overall, we continue to estimate a steeply negative return/risk for stocks on horizons from 2-weeks to 18 months. I recognize that this is easy to treat as disposable news, given that the ensemble methods we developed to capture both post-war and Depression-era data have indicated a negative return/risk profile for stocks since April 2010, yet the S&P 500 is 18% higher today than it was at that time. Central bank interventions have certainly played a role in that gain. But then, our prospective return/risk estimates have been in the lowest 1% of historical data only since March, and the market loss that would erase the intervening gain since April 2010 is one that we would consider small from the perspective of present market conditions. The average cyclical bear market has historically wiped out more than half of the preceding bull market advance, and stocks have typically surrendered closer to 80% of their preceding bull market gains when the cyclical bear is part of a “secular” bear period such as the one we’ve experienced since 2000 (see the discussion of cyclical and secular fluctuations in A False Sense of Security). I remain convinced that we will observe numerous points in the market cycle ahead where the evidence will support a significant and even aggressive exposure to market fluctuations. Now is not one of those points.
While our estimates of prospective return/risk in stocks remain among the most negative instances we’ve observed in a century of market history, it is important to note that these estimates are largely independent of our conviction that the U.S. economy has already entered a recession. They are also independent of our concerns about instability in the European banking system. With regard to Europe’s banking strains, the capital needs of Spanish banks were estimated at modest levels last week only due to the heroic assumption that distressed banks would be able to massively deleverage their balance sheets without amplifying their losses – an assumption that ZeroHedge refers to as deus ex-fudge while begging the question “just who will these banks sell said debt to?”
Overall, we continue to estimate a steeply negative return/risk for stocks on horizons from 2-weeks to 18 months. I recognize that this is easy to treat as disposable news, given that the ensemble methods we developed to capture both post-war and Depression-era data have indicated a negative return/risk profile for stocks since April 2010, yet the S&P 500 is 18% higher today than it was at that time. Central bank interventions have certainly played a role in that gain. But then, our prospective return/risk estimates have been in the lowest 1% of historical data only since March, and the market loss that would erase the intervening gain since April 2010 is one that we would consider small from the perspective of present market conditions. The average cyclical bear market has historically wiped out more than half of the preceding bull market advance, and stocks have typically surrendered closer to 80% of their preceding bull market gains when the cyclical bear is part of a “secular” bear period such as the one we’ve experienced since 2000 (see the discussion of cyclical and secular fluctuations in A False Sense of Security). I remain convinced that we will observe numerous points in the market cycle ahead where the evidence will support a significant and even aggressive exposure to market fluctuations. Now is not one of those points.
While our estimates of prospective return/risk in stocks remain among the most negative instances we’ve observed in a century of market history, it is important to note that these estimates are largely independent of our conviction that the U.S. economy has already entered a recession. They are also independent of our concerns about instability in the European banking system. With regard to Europe’s banking strains, the capital needs of Spanish banks were estimated at modest levels last week only due to the heroic assumption that distressed banks would be able to massively deleverage their balance sheets without amplifying their losses – an assumption that ZeroHedge refers to as deus ex-fudge while begging the question “just who will these banks sell said debt to?”
by John P. Hussman, PhD., Hussman Funds | Read more:
The Ripple Effect
Medinah, Ill. -- You never know which teacher lessons will stick with you. A teacher, for some reason, once told us that when you’re carrying liquid -- a bowl of soup, a cup filled too high with water, a coffee mug -- you shouldn’t look at the liquid while you walk.
Why? Because, she said, if you look at the water you will see it slosh and splash shake. And seeing that will make you shake. And the water will wade a little more, making you shake a little more, making the liquid move a little more, making you shake even more, on and on, until you spill.
Here’s the part that sticks with me: She said that you will always underestimate the power of tiny ripples. You will always believe that you are steadier than you think you are. (...)
***
The coolest way to observe a Ryder Cup is through sound. Once the matches are rolling, you will hear sounds everywhere. Huge roars. Light cheers. Applause. Groans. U-S-A chants. Ole-ole-ole sing-song. It’s hard to tell where they come from -- they rattle up in the trees and come down all around you -- but after a while you learn to make out what they mean.
The sounds in the early part of Sunday’s golf suggested that everything was going OK for the U.S.A. It was a cool on Sunday afternoon. The merchandise tent was overflowing -- they must make millions. The Europeans were trying to charge, but the U.S. was holding its own. Webb Simpson had a two-up lead on Ian Poulter early. The Johnson boys -- Dustin and Zach -- seemed to be controlling their matches. Jim Furyk seemed to be outplaying Sergio Garcia. There was no reason to believe that anything unusual was going to happen.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started to turn. Maybe it was when Poulter squared up his match against Simpson with back-to-back birdies. Poulter was the heartbeat for this European team. He’s brash, he’s a bit goofy, he’s a Twitter fanatic, he loves attention, and he has never quite broken through.
But he is a fierce Ryder Cup player. His record at the Ryder Cup is otherworldly -- 10-3 coming into Sunday’s singles -- and on Saturday evening, after the sun set, he made a putt in the dark that gave Europe a half point and inspired his teammates. “That was when we thought [a comeback] was possible,” Olazabal would say.
The crowd tried to give Poulter the hardest time -- he loves engaging the U.S. crowd. But the harder time they gave him, the better he played. When he evened the match with Simpson, maybe there was something a little bit bigger rippling.
***
Seve Ballesteros’s memory was ever-present all week at the Ryder Cup. Ballesteros, probably more than anyone, created the Ryder Cup as we now know it, with all the intensity and fervor and pressure. He died last year. People talked about him constantly around Medinah. There were images of him wherever you turned, especially around the European team. And, of course, his favorite playing partner, Olazabal, was coaching the Europeans … and nearly crying every time Seve’s name came up.
Ballesteros was a force of nature. He saw the Ryder Cup as a cause … a chance to prove to everyone that players in Europe were just as good as American players, a chance to show just how fierce they could be. He did not just lead the European teams to victory, he told his teammates (and players, when he was a coach) that they were tougher than the U.S. players, that they had more heart, that they would win, that they had ALREADY won, but they just didn’t know it yet.
His positive force pushed players beyond their expectations. Could any of this have played a role on Sunday, even with Seve gone? I guess it depends what you believe. The European players did talk about feeling his presence. “I have no doubt in my mind that he was with me today all day,” Sergio Garcia would say. The way it ended for Garcia and American Jim Furyk, it’s not hard to imagine the ghost of Seve Ballesteros being nearby.
by Joe Posanski, Sports on Earth | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
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