Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope
Economies of scale and scope (and variety, though we won’t go there today) are both types of learning.
Economies of scope are the advantages that can result when similar processes are used to deliver a set of distinct products or services.
As a first approximation, you could say that economies of scale result from learning the engineering, while economies of scope result from learning the marketing. The first is primarily a one-front war between a business and nature. The second is primarily a two-front war where a business fights nature on one front, and market incumbents on another. As an aside, both kinds of learning are war-time learning: they proceed in an environment where failure equals death for the firm.
More on this after we look at the details of the two learning processes.
Learning in Scaling
The key to economies of scale is process learning of the sort that the consulting firm BCG codified with its experience curves in the 1970s. Amortization of fixed costs across many instances is merely what makes the learning worthwhile, but the work of scaling lies in the learning. Getting to repeatability in an engineered process takes conscious and deliberate effort.
You can also think of scaling as the process of proving a steady-state financial hypothesis in a specific case. In other words, the amortization argument, which does not include the learning costs in getting to the design scale, is a hypothesis that you must set out to prove by construction. The equation is only true once the learning is over (and as we’ll see, it is therefore a “peacetime” model of business that applies during periods of detente between periods of business-war). The unknown learning costs are what might kill you. And usually they do, which is why pioneers rarely own markets that they create.
The ingenuity involved, I am now convinced, actually exceeds the ingenuity involved in coming up with the unscaled idea in the first place. Why do I say this? Because people who come up with great product ideas are a dime a dozen. People who figure out how to successfully scale an idea are far rarer. We tend to lionize “inventors” but the real heroes are probably the “scalers.”
Why exactly is there learning involved in scaling at all?
Economies of scale are the advantages that can result when repeatable processes are used to deliver large volumes of identical products or service instances. Scaling relies on interchangeable parts either in the product itself, or in the delivery mechanisms, in the case of intangible services.
Economies of scope are the advantages that can result when similar processes are used to deliver a set of distinct products or services.
As a first approximation, you could say that economies of scale result from learning the engineering, while economies of scope result from learning the marketing. The first is primarily a one-front war between a business and nature. The second is primarily a two-front war where a business fights nature on one front, and market incumbents on another. As an aside, both kinds of learning are war-time learning: they proceed in an environment where failure equals death for the firm.
More on this after we look at the details of the two learning processes.
Learning in Scaling
The key to economies of scale is process learning of the sort that the consulting firm BCG codified with its experience curves in the 1970s. Amortization of fixed costs across many instances is merely what makes the learning worthwhile, but the work of scaling lies in the learning. Getting to repeatability in an engineered process takes conscious and deliberate effort.
You can also think of scaling as the process of proving a steady-state financial hypothesis in a specific case. In other words, the amortization argument, which does not include the learning costs in getting to the design scale, is a hypothesis that you must set out to prove by construction. The equation is only true once the learning is over (and as we’ll see, it is therefore a “peacetime” model of business that applies during periods of detente between periods of business-war). The unknown learning costs are what might kill you. And usually they do, which is why pioneers rarely own markets that they create.
The ingenuity involved, I am now convinced, actually exceeds the ingenuity involved in coming up with the unscaled idea in the first place. Why do I say this? Because people who come up with great product ideas are a dime a dozen. People who figure out how to successfully scale an idea are far rarer. We tend to lionize “inventors” but the real heroes are probably the “scalers.”
Why exactly is there learning involved in scaling at all?
The law of large numbers: the more you scale, the more you expose your operations to rare phenomena that are expensive to deal with. Scaling is about dealing efficiently with events that occur with a predictable frequency. Hard disk failures are rare catastrophes for individuals. They are an operating condition for data centers.
Staircase effects: Capacity increases follow a staircase curve, but demand changes smoothly. You can only buy one airplane at a time. You cannot buy half an airplane for an airline. So you’re constantly undershooting or overshooting your capacity requirements while scaling. A particularly severe (but non-commercial) example is scaling an ordinary navy into a blue water navy with aircraft carriers, a challenge China is currently taking on. You generally need 3 carrier groups to have one in deployment at all times, and it takes a couple of decades (or a very active war) to climb the three-step staircase.
Loss windups: When you are running a small bakery, if your oven is malfunctioning, you might lose one batch of cookies before shutting down to fix the problem. In a scaled operation, due to the larger distances between loci of problem creation and discovery, and the sheer speed of operations, huge losses can pile up before you intervene. Soft failure cases are predictable inventory problems. Hard failures? Think about events like the Firestone tire recall and various instances of contaminated food products being recalled.
Accounting illegibility: Chances are, while scaling, you are slashing prices as fast as you can to grab the largest possible share of a new market. Such phases are called “land grabs” for a reason. Margins may seem strong but that’s only because the accounting simply cannot model and track a growing and learning operation accurately. Effective margins, after factoring in risks and crisis response costs, may be much lower than you think. Contributing to this is poor financial governance during scaling phases leading to a lot of waste, both justified (getting a major new order by any means necessary) and unjustified (people taking advantage of the chaos to indulge in profiteering)
Process Design Evolution: There is an enormous amount of iterative process redesign involved in successful scaling. As quickly as you discover rare conditions, unexpected operational risks and other blindside phenomena, you need to bake the knowledge into the process. This process must not only proceed very fast, but it has to be very elegant. A bad process adaptation to handle a contingency (think TSA security procedures following 9/11) can end up being both costly and ineffective, and add entropy to the process without increasing its capability.
Human Factor Variances: If people are involved, such as in scaling a sales operation, you have to very suddenly turn tacit, creative knowledge in the heads of the pioneers into explicit knowledge that can very cheaply be imparted to the cheapest available brains capable of handling it. In the process you may discover that your tacit knowledge is simply too expensive to codify and scale. This training failure can kill your business.
Gravitational Effects: When you scale, you start to influence and shape your environment rather than merely reacting to it. When you launch a small satellite into space, you can ignore its effect on the earth in orbit calculations. When you are talking about the Moon, you get a proper 2-body problem. One manifestation of gravitational effects is litigation. Get to a sufficient size, especially in America, and you are suddenly worth suing. Another interesting gravitational effect is late-stage growth investment flooding in: dumb money with growth expectations that might be unreasonable/greedy enough to kill the company.
Lucy Effects: Think about the classic scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy is working on a chocolate assembly line that moves faster and faster. When she fails to keep up, she has to start stuffing her mouth with chocolate. As with fluid flows going from laminar to turbulent, process flows too, experience phase transitions. To keep them efficient (“laminar”) with increasing velocity, you may need to reinvent (or refactor) the process entirely. These hidden reinventions can sometimes be harder than the original inventions.
When you step back and think about all this, you realize that scaling is basically the equivalent of deliberate practice (the 10,000 hours idea) for companies. The COO is typically the unsung hero leading this scaling process (and often is promoted to CEO during the transition to a scaling phase).
By leaving the unpredictable learning costs out of the equation, Economics 101 professors tend to make scaling sound like a matter of so it shall be written, so it shall be done pronouncement. In practice, the outcome of scaling efforts is anything but certain, even for a wildly successful product. If you can find the right sort of talented people to drive the process the first time you attempt it, you will find that you can improve your process capabilities just slightly faster than you are increasing production volumes. Enough to deliver something approximating the cost lowering promised by the micro-economic calculations. The equation is only true if your learning costs come in under the hidden, assumed threshold. Otherwise you win a Pyrrhic victory, or get killed along the way.
If you succeed with one product, you’ve achieved something far more precious than that one product: an organization that has learned-how-to-learn the scaling challenge for a class of processes. The next time around, you can use your past (i.e., “experience curves” — now you know why they are called that) to learn faster, better.
Staircase effects: Capacity increases follow a staircase curve, but demand changes smoothly. You can only buy one airplane at a time. You cannot buy half an airplane for an airline. So you’re constantly undershooting or overshooting your capacity requirements while scaling. A particularly severe (but non-commercial) example is scaling an ordinary navy into a blue water navy with aircraft carriers, a challenge China is currently taking on. You generally need 3 carrier groups to have one in deployment at all times, and it takes a couple of decades (or a very active war) to climb the three-step staircase.
Loss windups: When you are running a small bakery, if your oven is malfunctioning, you might lose one batch of cookies before shutting down to fix the problem. In a scaled operation, due to the larger distances between loci of problem creation and discovery, and the sheer speed of operations, huge losses can pile up before you intervene. Soft failure cases are predictable inventory problems. Hard failures? Think about events like the Firestone tire recall and various instances of contaminated food products being recalled.
Accounting illegibility: Chances are, while scaling, you are slashing prices as fast as you can to grab the largest possible share of a new market. Such phases are called “land grabs” for a reason. Margins may seem strong but that’s only because the accounting simply cannot model and track a growing and learning operation accurately. Effective margins, after factoring in risks and crisis response costs, may be much lower than you think. Contributing to this is poor financial governance during scaling phases leading to a lot of waste, both justified (getting a major new order by any means necessary) and unjustified (people taking advantage of the chaos to indulge in profiteering)
Process Design Evolution: There is an enormous amount of iterative process redesign involved in successful scaling. As quickly as you discover rare conditions, unexpected operational risks and other blindside phenomena, you need to bake the knowledge into the process. This process must not only proceed very fast, but it has to be very elegant. A bad process adaptation to handle a contingency (think TSA security procedures following 9/11) can end up being both costly and ineffective, and add entropy to the process without increasing its capability.
Human Factor Variances: If people are involved, such as in scaling a sales operation, you have to very suddenly turn tacit, creative knowledge in the heads of the pioneers into explicit knowledge that can very cheaply be imparted to the cheapest available brains capable of handling it. In the process you may discover that your tacit knowledge is simply too expensive to codify and scale. This training failure can kill your business.
Gravitational Effects: When you scale, you start to influence and shape your environment rather than merely reacting to it. When you launch a small satellite into space, you can ignore its effect on the earth in orbit calculations. When you are talking about the Moon, you get a proper 2-body problem. One manifestation of gravitational effects is litigation. Get to a sufficient size, especially in America, and you are suddenly worth suing. Another interesting gravitational effect is late-stage growth investment flooding in: dumb money with growth expectations that might be unreasonable/greedy enough to kill the company.
Lucy Effects: Think about the classic scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy is working on a chocolate assembly line that moves faster and faster. When she fails to keep up, she has to start stuffing her mouth with chocolate. As with fluid flows going from laminar to turbulent, process flows too, experience phase transitions. To keep them efficient (“laminar”) with increasing velocity, you may need to reinvent (or refactor) the process entirely. These hidden reinventions can sometimes be harder than the original inventions.
When you step back and think about all this, you realize that scaling is basically the equivalent of deliberate practice (the 10,000 hours idea) for companies. The COO is typically the unsung hero leading this scaling process (and often is promoted to CEO during the transition to a scaling phase).
By leaving the unpredictable learning costs out of the equation, Economics 101 professors tend to make scaling sound like a matter of so it shall be written, so it shall be done pronouncement. In practice, the outcome of scaling efforts is anything but certain, even for a wildly successful product. If you can find the right sort of talented people to drive the process the first time you attempt it, you will find that you can improve your process capabilities just slightly faster than you are increasing production volumes. Enough to deliver something approximating the cost lowering promised by the micro-economic calculations. The equation is only true if your learning costs come in under the hidden, assumed threshold. Otherwise you win a Pyrrhic victory, or get killed along the way.
If you succeed with one product, you’ve achieved something far more precious than that one product: an organization that has learned-how-to-learn the scaling challenge for a class of processes. The next time around, you can use your past (i.e., “experience curves” — now you know why they are called that) to learn faster, better.
by Venkat, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
Will Privacy Go to the Dogs?
[ed. See also: Devices go nose to nose with bomb-sniffer dogs.]
This Halloween, the United States Supreme Court will devote its day to dogs. The court will hear two cases from Florida to test whether “police dog sniffs” violate our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. These two cases have not yet grabbed many headlines, but the court’s decisions could shape our rights to privacy in profound and surprising ways.
The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ordinarily, unless the police trespass or otherwise intrude upon a reasonable expectation of privacy, they need not have probable cause or a warrant to justify their investigative activity. For decades now, the court has struggled with what it means for a person to have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” — especially when the police investigate with sense-enhancing means or technology.
One of the new cases asks the court to clarify how accurate a dog must be in terms of its past identification of contraband — for, as Justice David H. Souter once warned in dissent, “The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction.” (...)
The second of the court’s new dog cases asks if the police may take a drug-sniffing dog to the front porch of a home to sniff for evidence of marijuana inside. The court has always accorded special privacy protection for people’s homes. In 2001, the court ruled, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that police officers violated a homeowner’s privacy when they parked across the street from a home and, without a warrant, used a thermal imaging device to scan the outside of the house for signs of unusual heat inside that might be caused by high-intensity lighting, which is often used to grow marijuana.
If the police can’t thermal-scan your home from the street, why let them dog-scan it from your front porch? The government argues that a dog is alerted only by illegal contraband, while a thermal imager is set off more generally by “innocent” and “guilty” heat of all kinds coming from a home — whether from grow lights or from, as Justice Scalia noted in the thermal imager case, “the lady of the house” as she “takes her daily sauna and bath.”
But, arguably, this distinction is misplaced. If the court rules for the government in the home-sniff case, it is hard to see why the police could not station drug-sniffing dogs outside the entrances to every school, supermarket and movie theater as a routine form of drug interdiction. Dog sniffs would never involve a privacy intrusion and therefore would not trigger the requirement that the police obtain a warrant or have individual suspicion.
Moreover, today’s dogs will give way to tomorrow’s high-tech contraband-scanning devices that, under the reasoning pressed in the dog cases, would free the government to conduct routine scans of people’s homes or their bodies for all manner of contraband (or possibly for noncontraband, like marijuana grow lights, that are most commonly associated with illegality).
This Halloween, the United States Supreme Court will devote its day to dogs. The court will hear two cases from Florida to test whether “police dog sniffs” violate our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. These two cases have not yet grabbed many headlines, but the court’s decisions could shape our rights to privacy in profound and surprising ways.
The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ordinarily, unless the police trespass or otherwise intrude upon a reasonable expectation of privacy, they need not have probable cause or a warrant to justify their investigative activity. For decades now, the court has struggled with what it means for a person to have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” — especially when the police investigate with sense-enhancing means or technology.One of the new cases asks the court to clarify how accurate a dog must be in terms of its past identification of contraband — for, as Justice David H. Souter once warned in dissent, “The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction.” (...)
The second of the court’s new dog cases asks if the police may take a drug-sniffing dog to the front porch of a home to sniff for evidence of marijuana inside. The court has always accorded special privacy protection for people’s homes. In 2001, the court ruled, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that police officers violated a homeowner’s privacy when they parked across the street from a home and, without a warrant, used a thermal imaging device to scan the outside of the house for signs of unusual heat inside that might be caused by high-intensity lighting, which is often used to grow marijuana.
If the police can’t thermal-scan your home from the street, why let them dog-scan it from your front porch? The government argues that a dog is alerted only by illegal contraband, while a thermal imager is set off more generally by “innocent” and “guilty” heat of all kinds coming from a home — whether from grow lights or from, as Justice Scalia noted in the thermal imager case, “the lady of the house” as she “takes her daily sauna and bath.”
But, arguably, this distinction is misplaced. If the court rules for the government in the home-sniff case, it is hard to see why the police could not station drug-sniffing dogs outside the entrances to every school, supermarket and movie theater as a routine form of drug interdiction. Dog sniffs would never involve a privacy intrusion and therefore would not trigger the requirement that the police obtain a warrant or have individual suspicion.
Moreover, today’s dogs will give way to tomorrow’s high-tech contraband-scanning devices that, under the reasoning pressed in the dog cases, would free the government to conduct routine scans of people’s homes or their bodies for all manner of contraband (or possibly for noncontraband, like marijuana grow lights, that are most commonly associated with illegality).
by Jeffrey A. Meyer, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Kelsey Dake
The List
[ed. A story with a few angles, some quite humorous.]
For more than a year, the police have been investigating reports that the local Zumba instructor was using her exercise studio on a quaint downtown street for more than fitness training. In fact, the police say, she was running a one-woman brothel with up to 150 clients and secretly videotaping them as they engaged in intimate acts.
Now, the police have started releasing the names of her clients who have been charged with patronizing a prostitute. This has set the town buzzing because the list is rumored to be replete with the names of prominent people. (The Portland Press Herald identified one suspect as a former mayor of South Portland.) The first 21 people, whose names were released Monday, are to appear in court on Dec. 5.
The release of the names has stirred chatter everywhere here — in coffee shops, parking lots and the small shops along York Street, the main drag — about who was on the list. It has also prompted debate over whether the names should be released. And it no doubt has led to less academic discussions behind the closed doors of many homes across this region.
One local entrepreneur tapped into the zeitgeist and printed up T-shirts that read: “I’m not on the list. Are you?” They sold out instantly.
The case is somewhat complicated. The police say that by videotaping her clients, Alexis Wright, 29, the Zumba instructor, invaded their privacy and that the clients, in addition to being suspected perpetrators, are also thus victims.
That led to a convoluted court ruling that the names of the clients would be released but without further identifying information, like their addresses or dates of birth.
“People throughout New England are up in arms that their names might match,” Lt. Anthony Bean Burpee said in an interview.
When a list of the first 21 names was made public Monday night, it contained many common names. “Paul Main” was one, and the news whipped around town because Paul Main once worked for the sheriff’s department and even ran for sheriff himself a few years ago.
That Paul Main said in an interview Tuesday that when he saw his name on television, he started to laugh. But when he heard that a Boston radio station was identifying him as a client, he stopped laughing.
Mr. Main, 65, said that despite the mix-up, he has not suffered any real harm — but that other people could. He believes the names should be published, but only with identifying information. “There should be no ambiguity,” he said.
Late Tuesday, Justice Thomas Warren of Superior Court reversed himself and ruled that the addresses could be released; they were published Tuesday night.
Generally, women who were interviewed here seemed to applaud making the list public with as much information as possible. Men, on the other hand, generally thought that the crime was minor and that releasing the names would only harm the families.
by Katherine Q. Seelye, NY Times | Read more:
Photo:Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Going Gently Into That Good Night
These were three things my mother, Ann Krieger, was pondering when she reached the final leg of her terminal illness last year, a month before Mother’s Day. After several years of fighting colon cancer, her doctor broke the news that the cancer had spread and the treatment was no longer working. There was no more they could do.
“You’ve got months, not weeks,” he said.
“What should I do?” she asked. “Should I end it now?”
“No,” he said. “You don’t want to do that.”
Actually, my mother kind of did, but the doctor referred her to hospice and gave her information about palliative care, a mode of treatment that relieves the pain of patients with serious illnesses. But in my mother’s case, the physical distress was less acute than the existential. Coming to terms with the fact that you’re going to die is elusive. For some people, like her, an attempt to manage the logistics could make it seem more doable. She and my father had given this some thought and had very specific ideas about how they wanted their end-of-life matters handled. (...)
I believe that the power to make choices about how and when we die, when terminally ill, should be a basic human right. But there are various arguments against it. My favorite one says that it’s not for mortals to make such decisions because we are in God’s hands, however fumbling they may be. If God wants you to die in a certain manner, the logic seems to go, then that’s because it’s part of His plan. But what if God really doesn’t care one way or the other? It would be quite an administrative headache, after all. Consider that across the globe, roughly 150,000 people die every day, at a rate of about 107 people per minute. A little human intervention could go a long way during that last bumpy stretch.
Many doctors, however, tend to think differently. Knowing this all too well, my mother had filed away the name of an organization she thought might offer some guidance when the time came.
The week she started hospice care, at the beginning of April 2011, my father, Melvin, contacted them. A few days later, they got a call from Judith Schwarz, the clinical coordinator of Compassion & Choices, who lived nearby on the Upper West Side. She came over and spent a few hours talking with my parents, explaining her organization’s mission and discussing my mother’s illness and the options available. “She was warm and it was personal,” my father said. “She was a professional who is very skilled at dealing with situations like this.”
by Daniel Krieger, Narratively |Read more:
My Life as a Girl
Maybe I just want to be pretty.
Maybe I just want to feel pretty, or to look pretty. Some of those goals seem impossible, or incompatible, or prohibitively difficult; not worth what I would have to sacrifice. I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes. Given my tastes, at the moment, it might be better to say that I like dressing up as a girl. I like to wear costume jewelry, and pastel nail polish, and I do that all the time. I like to wear skirts and tights, or dresses, too, in private sometimes, in public fewer times, and in company when I can find an appropriate occasion, which I rarely can.
That’s been the case for a while. In my twenties I found the perfect social circle, and the perfect set of dance parties and rock clubs, where I could dress up like a girl and my friends didn’t mind—or found it charming. Then my favorite club closed. Then Jessie and I got married and moved to Minnesota, and my space for cross-dressing dried up. I minded, but not very much, because I liked the rest of my life. I even stopped wearing nail polish and sparkly rings for a while, though the poetry I published made its commitment to girlish identities, feminine alternate selves, all but unmistakable.
And now I have started dressing up again, every so often—I think all I want is every so often—and I’m ready to write about it in disjunctive and maybe all too self-conscious prose.
What follows are tentative answers to persistent questions about how I look, how I want to look, why I often think that I would rather have been a woman, and why I’m sure I won’t try to become one. It has to do with sexual feeling, but it says almost nothing about sexual acts. It’s no substitute for queer theory, nor for a cultural history of cross-dressing and other trans life-ways, nor for the book-length memoirs by trans people and their loved ones (one of my topics here is resistance to memoir, to narrative, to identifying your true self with one story that can be told), though all those forms of writing have helped me, and I refer to them. I also refer to poetry, since I care far more about poems—and think more often about them—than about how I look. I am a literary critic and a writer of verse, a parent and husband and friend, before and after I am a guy in a skirt, or a guy in blue jeans, or a fictional girl. I have tried to have as little concern for my own privacy as I can—I’m tired of keeping secrets and don’t want more. I have, on the other hand, tried to have as much concern as I can for Jessie’s privacy. I’ve chosen to share these parts of my life with you, if you stay with me; Jessie has chosen to share the whole of our life, not necessarily with readers, but with me.
People who know my name but haven’t met me usually know I’m a poetry critic and a book reviewer. In one important model of poetry-in-general, the poet constructs apersona (Greek poiein = to make; Latin persona = actors’ mask), a stylized mask made of words that replaces the poet’s physical, literal body, and provides a better fit for the soul. My own first published poems spoke of wanting to be a girl, or a woman, dramatically and tautologically: “If I were a girl, I would be a girl,” one said. Later I published poems in girl personae, such as “Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde,” about the teenage genius from the X-Men who has the power to walk through walls.
This essay is a substitute, not so much for a memoir, but for an unwritten, overlong, awkward, over-literal poem.
Recently I went shopping for a denim skirt that I could wear to an open house for trans people and cross-dressers, the venerable Tiffany Club in suburban Boston. I’ve now gone to two open houses, and I’ll go to more, though I don’t know how often, since we have a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and the open house events conflict with both of their bedtimes. It’s astonishingly helpful to find a space where trans people can meet one another without being expected to date, or to dance on stage, or to seek medical attention. Also, it turns out, I like being addressed as Stephanie. Some of the folks I met there are learning to live full-time in their preferred gender (with or sans surgeries). Others are more like me; they enjoy dressing up.
by Stephen Burt, VQR | Read more:
Maybe I just want to feel pretty, or to look pretty. Some of those goals seem impossible, or incompatible, or prohibitively difficult; not worth what I would have to sacrifice. I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes. Given my tastes, at the moment, it might be better to say that I like dressing up as a girl. I like to wear costume jewelry, and pastel nail polish, and I do that all the time. I like to wear skirts and tights, or dresses, too, in private sometimes, in public fewer times, and in company when I can find an appropriate occasion, which I rarely can.
That’s been the case for a while. In my twenties I found the perfect social circle, and the perfect set of dance parties and rock clubs, where I could dress up like a girl and my friends didn’t mind—or found it charming. Then my favorite club closed. Then Jessie and I got married and moved to Minnesota, and my space for cross-dressing dried up. I minded, but not very much, because I liked the rest of my life. I even stopped wearing nail polish and sparkly rings for a while, though the poetry I published made its commitment to girlish identities, feminine alternate selves, all but unmistakable.
And now I have started dressing up again, every so often—I think all I want is every so often—and I’m ready to write about it in disjunctive and maybe all too self-conscious prose.
***
What follows are tentative answers to persistent questions about how I look, how I want to look, why I often think that I would rather have been a woman, and why I’m sure I won’t try to become one. It has to do with sexual feeling, but it says almost nothing about sexual acts. It’s no substitute for queer theory, nor for a cultural history of cross-dressing and other trans life-ways, nor for the book-length memoirs by trans people and their loved ones (one of my topics here is resistance to memoir, to narrative, to identifying your true self with one story that can be told), though all those forms of writing have helped me, and I refer to them. I also refer to poetry, since I care far more about poems—and think more often about them—than about how I look. I am a literary critic and a writer of verse, a parent and husband and friend, before and after I am a guy in a skirt, or a guy in blue jeans, or a fictional girl. I have tried to have as little concern for my own privacy as I can—I’m tired of keeping secrets and don’t want more. I have, on the other hand, tried to have as much concern as I can for Jessie’s privacy. I’ve chosen to share these parts of my life with you, if you stay with me; Jessie has chosen to share the whole of our life, not necessarily with readers, but with me.
***
People who know my name but haven’t met me usually know I’m a poetry critic and a book reviewer. In one important model of poetry-in-general, the poet constructs apersona (Greek poiein = to make; Latin persona = actors’ mask), a stylized mask made of words that replaces the poet’s physical, literal body, and provides a better fit for the soul. My own first published poems spoke of wanting to be a girl, or a woman, dramatically and tautologically: “If I were a girl, I would be a girl,” one said. Later I published poems in girl personae, such as “Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde,” about the teenage genius from the X-Men who has the power to walk through walls.
This essay is a substitute, not so much for a memoir, but for an unwritten, overlong, awkward, over-literal poem.
Recently I went shopping for a denim skirt that I could wear to an open house for trans people and cross-dressers, the venerable Tiffany Club in suburban Boston. I’ve now gone to two open houses, and I’ll go to more, though I don’t know how often, since we have a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and the open house events conflict with both of their bedtimes. It’s astonishingly helpful to find a space where trans people can meet one another without being expected to date, or to dance on stage, or to seek medical attention. Also, it turns out, I like being addressed as Stephanie. Some of the folks I met there are learning to live full-time in their preferred gender (with or sans surgeries). Others are more like me; they enjoy dressing up.
by Stephen Burt, VQR | Read more:
Monday, October 15, 2012
GM Mouse Created to Detect Landmines
[ed. I wonder what other "modifications" are being explored to achieve specific objectives.]
More than 70 countries are contaminated by landmines, a constant reminder of previous conflicts. "Long after wars have ended, communities are still impeded from going back to their normal, daily activities because of all these mines still affecting their land," said Charlotte D'Hulst of Hunter College, New York, who led the team that developed the MouSensor.
One approach to clearing landmines is to use HeroRats, giant pouched rats that are trained to sniff out landmines by the Belgian NGO, Apopo.
Two of these, with a human handler, can clear an area of 300 sq metres in less than two hours. It would take two people about two days to do the same. One disadvantage of the HeroRats system, however, is that the rats need nine months' training before they are ready for landmine detection.
D'Hulst wanted to improve on the HeroRats concept by creating a genetically modified "supersniffer" mouse, sensitive to the specific odour of the explosives in landmines, TNT.
by Alok Jah, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Feinstein Lab, Hunter College
Suddenly Everyone Wants New Yorker Style Content
[ed. And this should be a surprise to anyone?]
This is great news….mostly.
For a long time, I’ve said that I thought the reason journalism was reeling was its own fault. Daily papers had a de facto monopoly — on news, classifieds, movie listing, stock quotes, sports scores, and all types of content. And yes, the Internet destroyed it. But if daily newspapers in aggregate, had been good stewards of that role in the community, people would still have read them. Most daily papers, instead, were like the one from my hometown: more daily than a newspaper. Like paying with the cable company, no one particularly loved reading it, but there wasn’t another option for getting all those things I describe above delivered to you daily.
Simply put: It was easy and cheap for a lot of other players on the Web to outdo daily newspaper journalism for cheap or free. And that lead to a wave of massive commodification of news. But those glimmers of really great storytelling and investigative work that weren’t in the paper every day were ravaged as part of the shift. And there was no clear way to replace it. Good content isn’t free — as anyone who struggles to write it or hire good talent knows.
I’ve always been confident that it would become valued again one day, and the market would figure out a way to pay for it — either by non-page view based ads or subscriptions. But I felt that as an industry we had a period of penance for that abuse of a monopoly position, maybe our own 40 years of wandering in the desert.
Well, that was a short 40 years. It seems good quality work has come raging back into vogue. There are a handful of upstarts the raison d’être of which is reporting, writing, and long form work — we’re part of that, as is NSFWCORP, and even The Verge produces some long spectacularly written stuff. Meanwhile you have companies you’d least expect investing in it. Buzzfeed, which already enjoys a schizophrenic life as a purveyor of cat photos and political scoops, announced it’s going to focus on long-form journalism, and now Tumblr, which isn’t even a content company, is getting in on the act.
So much of this boils down to one big change in the Internet: A lot of companies are being built out of New York. New York loves, will pay for, values, and excels at producing quality content in a way that Silicon Valley never will. And, at least in our experience, audiences are gulping it down like water in a desert.
In our recent reader survey almost every respondent answered why they read PandoDaily with a variation of the following: Long form content that isn’t afraid to call out powerful people. When we asked what could make the site better, I was surprised that several people actually said longer content. And these aren’t just those six hundred people who have time to fill out a survey. Our 2,000-3,000 word stories consistently drive the most traffic, and have for our eight-month existence.
So people want to pay for long form journalism, and readers want to read it. Wow, suddenly journalism isn’t so dead, right? Not so fast. There’s still one big problem here: Who the hell is going to write all this brilliant New Yorker style prose? (...)
Simply put: Without a system that trains people how to do a New Yorker style piece, there are none for Tumblr and Buzzfeed to commission, nothing for those readers who so badly want it to soak up. We’ve got the money and the demand, but a disastrous paucity of supply.
Within 10 years, the industry’s biggest challenge has been totally inverted. Before, we had all this talent and no one to pay for or read it. Now, it’s just the opposite.
by Sarah Lacy, Pando Daily | Read more:
Image via: Wikimedia
Mortify Our Wolves
We hear, and look up as one at the two attendants hurriedly wheeling something so shrunken it seems merely another rumple in the blanket, tubes traveling in and out of its impalpability, its only life this lifeless cry.
The doors open soundlessly, and the pall of sorrow goes flowing off into the annihilating brightness beyond. Then the doors close, and we as one look down, not meeting each other’s eyes, and wait.
The terrible thing—it could perhaps be a glorious thing; always the ill are meant to see it as such, are reproached if they don’t (carpe fucking diem)—the terrible thing about feeling the inevitability of your own early death is the way it colors every single scene: at some friends’ house I am moved by the beauty and antics of their two-year-old daughter—moved, and then saddened to think of the daughter D. and I might have, for whom my death will be some deep, lightless hole, which for the rest of her life she will walk around, grief the very ground of her being. What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?
Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.
That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith—or what looked like faith?—rather than find it. It is the flinch from life—which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death—and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.
But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake—or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the “still, small voice” that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it. (...)
Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence. This is why being saved (I dislike the language, too, not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s corrupted by contemporary usage, a hands-in-the-air, holy-seizure sort of rapture, a definitive sense of rift) involves embracing rather than renouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated to existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented thing striving against existence or caught forever just outside it. (...)
When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died 20 years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world. Hers was the kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it, but is passive rather than active. It allows the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.
Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.
That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith—or what looked like faith?—rather than find it. It is the flinch from life—which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death—and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.
But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake—or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the “still, small voice” that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it. (...)
Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence. This is why being saved (I dislike the language, too, not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s corrupted by contemporary usage, a hands-in-the-air, holy-seizure sort of rapture, a definitive sense of rift) involves embracing rather than renouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated to existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented thing striving against existence or caught forever just outside it. (...)
When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died 20 years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world. Hers was the kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it, but is passive rather than active. It allows the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.
by Christian Wiman, The American Scholar | Read more:
Michael Winslow
To those of you too young to remember the famed Police Academy series of movies, you missed out on a true gem of the '80s, Michael Winslow. The man was the king of sound effects. If you don't believe me, check out the above video where Winslow does a mean Robert Plant impersonation for "Whole Lotta Love" and then creates a ripping guitar solo ENTIRELY WITH HIS MOUTH. How do you do it Michael?
h/t GS
What Psychopaths Teach Us About How to Succeed
If you are born under the right star, for example, and have power over the human mind as the moon over the sea, you might order the genocide of 100,000 Kurds and shuffle to the gallows with such arcane recalcitrance as to elicit, from even your harshest detractors, perverse, unspoken deference.
“Do not be afraid, doctor,” said Saddam Hussein on the scaffold, moments before his execution. “This is for men.”
If you are violent and cunning, like the real-life “Hannibal Lecter” Robert Maudsley, you might take a fellow inmate hostage, smash his skull in and sample his brains with a spoon as nonchalantly as if you were downing a soft-boiled egg. (Maudsley, by the way, has been cooped up in solitary confinement for the past 30 years, in a bulletproof cage in the basement of Wakefield Prison in England.)
Or if you are a brilliant neurosurgeon, ruthlessly cool and focused under pressure, you might, like the man I'll call Dr. Geraghty, try your luck on a completely different playing field: at the remote outposts of 21st-century medicine, where risk blows in on 100-mile-per-hour winds and the oxygen of deliberation is thin. “I have no compassion for those whom I operate on,” he told me. “That is a luxury I simply cannot afford. In the theater I am reborn: as a cold, heartless machine, totally at one with scalpel, drill and saw. When you're cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren't fit for purpose. Emotion is entropy—and seriously bad for business. I've hunted it down to extinction over the years.”
Geraghty is one of the U.K.'s top neurosurgeons—and although, on one level, his words send a chill down the spine, on another they make perfect sense. Deep in the ghettoes of some of the brain's most dangerous neighborhoods, the psychopath is glimpsed as a lone and merciless predator, a solitary species of transient, deadly allure. No sooner is the word out than images of serial killers, rapists and mad, reclusive bombers come stalking down the sidewalks of our minds.
But what if I were to paint you a different picture? What if I were to tell you that the arsonist who burns your house down might also, in a parallel universe, be the hero most likely to brave the flaming timbers of a crumbling, blazing building to seek out, and drag out, your loved ones? Or that the kid with a knife in the shadows at the back of the movie theater might well, in years to come, be wielding a rather different kind of knife at the back of a rather different kind of theater?
Claims like these are admittedly hard to believe. But they're true. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless and focused. Yet, contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily violent. Far from its being an open-and-shut case—you're either a psychopath or you're not—there are, instead, inner and outer zones of the disorder: a bit like the fare zones on a subway map. There is a spectrum of psychopathy along which each of us has our place, with only a small minority of A-listers resident in the “inner city.”
by Kevin Dutton, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Tim Bower
The Temporary City...Maybe
However, there is another, far more compelling and humane way to view these camps, and that is as prototypical urban types. The various ways in which we define the urban, such as population density, non-agricultural economic activity, and reasonably well-defined boundaries, are conditions that are here amply met. And when one considers the ways in which people artificially conjure cities (consider a company town, built for the sole purpose of extracting a natural resource), then why shouldn’t we consider refugee camps to be cities? More importantly, if we do consent to think of them as cities, what is it that we can learn from them?
Consider, for example, the three refugee camps collectively known as Daadab, in northeastern Kenya. Founded in 1991 to take in Somali refugees from the then-new civil war, the camp is now the world’s largest, and is still growing after 22 years; the influx of new arrivals has been guaranteed not only by the still-unresolved civil war, but also by the added stress of two failed monsoons in the Horn of Africa. As a result,
Dadaab is now the third-largest city in Kenya, but there are no Kenyans living there. Instead, it is home to 450,000 Somalis in a camp that was built for 90,000 people. Refugees…are not permitted to leave the camp, because the Kenyan government wants them to remain refugees and not become illegal immigrants. The government also prohibits them from working.This illustrates the paradox of the refugee camp and why, at first blush, it may seem counterintuitive to think of this form as a fundamentally, if prototypically, urban one. For one, the restrictions on the freedom of mobility violates our contemporary conception of the city: as a place to which people migrate in order to seek economic opportunity (I should note that this is debunked below). The additional perception of refugees as victims dependent on the largesse of both host country and humanitarian organizations – which, of course, operate under their own incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the long-term desires of the refugees – further removes them from the perception as independent actors.
And yet, as the case of Dadaab reveals, we really do have a city on our hands. The logistics of housing and feeding nearly half a million people are formidable, and to facilitate an organized approach the camp is laid out in a grid, with every family assigned an address. Even though it may be motivated only by pragmatism, this is de facto urban planning.The grid layout, by seeking out the efficiencies generated by proximity, creates the conditions for a socialization that is specifically urban. This is particularly striking when one realizes that those being so “urbanized” are people who had, up until that point, likely lived in rural settings. And as the camps grow, infrastructure and services have to maintain pace, and schools and hospitals are founded at strategic locations in order to serve the population. There are also “internet cafes, pharmacies, auto repair shops, and bus depots.” On the other end of things, formal cemeteries have been established and the burial of the dead regimented.
by Misha Lepetik, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Stephen Colbert Steps Out of Character
[ed. ...and has some interesting things to say about satire and the 2012 Presidential race.]
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)