Neighbors

[ed. See also:  The Long Shot.]

Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.

The planet is the lightest one ever found orbiting another star and — in the words of its discoverer, Xavier Dumusque, a graduate student at the Geneva Observatory — “it will surely be the closest one ever.”

It is presumably a rocky ball like our own, but it is not habitable. It circles Alpha Centauri B, a reddish orb about half as luminous as the Sun, every three days at a distance of only about four million miles, resulting in hellish surface temperatures of 1,200 degrees.

So this is not “Earth 2.0.” Yet.

Astronomers said the discovery raised the possibility that there were habitable Earthlike planets right next door and that methods and instruments were now precise enough to detect them.

“Very small planets are not rare,” said Mr. Dumusque, who is the lead author of a paper being published on Wednesday in Nature. “When you find one small planet, you find others.” He and his colleagues discussed the results on Tuesday in a news conference hosted by the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

Astronomers were electrified by the news of the planet, but also cautioned that it needed confirmation by other astronomers, not an easy task.

by Dennis Overbye, NY Times |  Read more:

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Alex Rodriguez, All American

Beyond the superhuman prerequisites—talent oozing out of pores, a decade or so of dominance, preferably a full head of hair—it's not quite clear what fans actually want in their all-time great baseball players. But it is clear that whatever that is, Alex Rodriguez isn't providing it. Which is weird at first glance, but less so when we look at who we're talking about here. For all the things that are permitted of baseball's generation-defining stars—and it's a lot, from transcendently prickly and prickish vanity, to being a colorful but nihilistic and doomed drunk—the one thing they are not allowed, it turns out, is being the way A-Rod is.

Rodriguez has had the tough part of immortality locked down for years—if he hadn't moved, without complaint, from shortstop to third base after joining the New York Yankees in 2004, he'd be regarded as the best shortstop ever to play the game; he probably is anyway. He has won three Most Valuable Player awards, five home run titles, and has a decent chance—he'd only need to hit 23 per season over the next five years—to hit more homers than any player ever to play baseball. Per Baseball Reference's formula, Rodriguez has been worth 111.4 Wins Above Replacement over his career; Albert Pujols, his nearest active competitor, has been worth 22.9 fewer. Rodriguez is not only one of the best prospects ever, he's one of the greatest baseball players in the history of baseball players. Everyone knows this, and it still doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because whatever the other, ineffable things we seek in our all-timers are, Rodriguez not only lacks, but exemplifies their opposite. All-timers are allowed to be virtuous ciphers whose robo-hearts pump whole milk, but A-Rod, a buff android coated in marzipan and inauthenticity, can't even clear that low bar of dull verisimilitude—it's easy to imagine RoboCop (he works in private security now), John Tesh, and Mitt Romney chuckling together on Skype about how deeply inauthentic and distant and weird A-Rod seems when he's asked to answer even basic baseball player questions.

All-timers are also, under certain circumstances and within different generations' parameters for colorful-ness, allowed to be total weeping whiskey-filled garbage bags—from Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle, the Yankees have had a special fondness for these sloshing four-finger pours of virtuosity. But, for all his travails—which include ill-advised dabblings in performance-enhancing drugs, a frosted-tip hairdo, and actual physical sex with Madonna—A-Rod can't quite pull that off, either. In all circumstances and in every way he comes off alien and affluence-perverted and so perversely and simultaneously self-regarding and oblivious that only the word "Miami" seems capable of summing it all up. His soul is upholstered in teal leather; his whole life is an overly air-conditioned and excessively security-guarded VIP section. This, for better or worse, is the best baseball player most fans presently alive have ever had the opportunity to watch play baseball.

In some ways, this is the fault of all those old, silly baseball biases—A-Rod has been simply too good at this sport, his mastery of it too transparently and transcendently fluent, for the necessary struggle to scan. He hits home runs, and the natural response, upon watching the swing that launched the bomb, is "of course." It was once this way with all those graceful gliding plays at shortstop; it was this way as recently as his outlandishly great 2007 MVP season, during which he was 31 years old. The first sin that Alex Rodriguez committed was an original one—he was born effortless, and fans have never quite forgiven him for that. This is almost a poignant thing, until Alex Rodriguez himself comes into play.

by David Roth, Vice |  Read more:

Windows Pushes Into the Tablet Age

Microsoft is giving Windows its most radical overhaul since 1995 and even its most devoted users won't recognize the venerable computer operating system in this new incarnation, called Windows 8, when it appears Oct. 26.

The minute you turn it on, the difference is apparent. Instead of the familiar desktop, you see a handsome, modern, slick world of large, scrolling tiles and simpler, full-screen apps best used on a touch screen and inspired by tablets and smartphones.

This is called the Start screen and it replaces the Start Menu every Windows user knows. But it's not just a menu, it's a whole computing environment that takes over the entire display, with its own separate apps and controls. The old desktop and old-style apps are still there. But in Windows 8, the desktop is like another app—you tap or click on a Start screen icon or button to use it.

This is a bold move and in my view, the new tile-based environment works very well and is a welcome step. It feels natural, especially on a touch screen, and brings Windows into the tablet era. It may even mark the beginning of a long transition in which the new design gradually displaces the old one, though that will depend on how fast Microsoft can attract new-style apps.

Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it's a one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That's a big contrast to Apple's approach, which uses separate operating systems for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.

Potential for Confusion

By adopting the dual-environment strategy, Microsoft risks confusing traditional PC users, who will be jumping back and forth between two ways of doing things. Both the new and old environments can work via either touch or a mouse and keyboard, but the former works best with touch, the latter best with the mouse or track pad.

There are even two different versions of Internet Explorer. And many functions are different. For instance, Start-screen apps typically lack the standard menus, toolbars, resizing and closing buttons at the top that older apps do.

The company is gambling that the confusion will be brief and will be offset by the ability, via the old desktop, to run traditional productivity apps like Microsoft Office, which can't be run on the iPad or its Android brethren.

by Walter S. Mossberg, WSJ |  Read more:
Image: Microsoft

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White out of Red

It's been twenty years since the first poster was created, but The Economist's iconic White out of Red ad campaign is now available to buy as a series of limited edition screen prints.

We're used to seeing illustrators and designers present their work for sale as prints, but this is the first time we've seen an advertising campaign presented in this way. Sonic Editions, founded by Russell Blackmore (a previous employee of The Economist), has formed a partnership with the newspaper to print some of the most iconic posters from their White out of Red ad campaign, with each iteration hand framed, and available in a limited edition of 250.

Originally created by Abbott Mead Vickers, the first poster in the campaign was "I never read The Economist", and the newspaper has continued to use this as an ongoing format.

via: Creative Review |  Read more:

Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign

With a bit less than three weeks to go before the election, let's pause to think about a little-discussed element of today's high-tech campaigns. Consider the humble campaign yard sign. Is there a more retro and prosaic feature of American electoral politics?

One day, as our dog and I walked along a low-volume-traffic street in Newton, Massachusetts, I saw a "Scott Brown for Senate" sign that hadn't been there the day before. Within a week, the same block had two "Elizabeth Warren for Senate" signs pop up on neighbors' lawns. Then, in rapid succession, a couple more signs for Brown showed up.

I began to wonder what motivates people to engage in this particular form of political participation. Are they simply making a bold statement of preference for candidate or party? Are they hoping to persuade others to be like-minded?

Or is there something more aggressively oppositional happening? When the initial sign is quickly followed by a flurry of others, are the newer-sign folks essentially giving a middle-finger salute to the neighbors down the block? Oh yeah?! HERE's what I think of your Obama!

Political scientists haven't paid much attention to this whole question. That's sort of amazing to me, in light of both how long yard signs have been a staple of American campaigns and what a public form of political participation it is. But into this void have stepped two intrepid scholars, Todd Maske and Anand E. Sokhey, authors of a paper titled "Not in My Front Yard! The Displaying of Yard Signs as a Form of Political Participation." They surveyed people in Franklin County, Ohio, who posted yard signs during the 2008 campaign.

Their study confirms much of what one would intuit about the subject. Maske and Sokhey found that "partisanship, ideological extremity, and political activism are characteristics of most individuals who engage in yard sign posting" and that people who engage in this form of political participation believe in "the power of yard signs to convey messages and information."

The authors only obliquely address what I think of as the "F-U Theory" of Yard Signs. Their findings, dampening my fun, suggest that far more people (93 percent) feel that "showing pride" is an important motivation behind their sign posting than feel that "letting the neighbors know" where they stand (75 percent) is important as a motivator. But they also found that people who live in politically heterogeneous neighborhoods are more likely to say they're "letting the neighbors know," and that people "whose neighbors have a sign in their yard are more likely to cite this motivation, whether the neighbor displays a sign for the same or the opposite candidate."

by John T. Tierney, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: Reuters

The Strangest Newspaper-Business Story I Have Ever Read

I really want to just tell you about this utterly strange business decision in the Seattle Times. But I thought it might be more instructive -- and more fun? -- to ask what you would do in their situation so that you can appreciate the severity of their challenge ... and the eccentricity of their decision.

YOU ARE: a media company executive. You own the Seattle Times. Profits are endangered. Ad dollars are down. Political ad revenue is down, especially. Your job is to find a solution.

FIRST: Consider some obvious possibilities. You can hire more sales people to pitch advertisers, including political campaigns. You can ask your current sales team to try harder, target smarter, pitch pithier, innovate! You can pinch pennies and layoff expensive editors, cut your travel and reimbursement budget, stop publishing on certain days, shrink your circulation, that kind of stuff.

SECOND: Consider some slightly less obvious options. You can invest in a new section that concentrates on the software revolution to attract targeted advertising for a Seattle audience. You can supplement revenue with new business divisions that you think could be profitable in a year or so, like an events arm or an annual conference.

What do you DO?

While you're thinking, here's what the Seattle Times Company did. It bought two advertisements in its own paper on behalf of political campaigns. It's as if The Atlantic replaced a "house ad" for The Atlantic Wire with a square that said "Exxon: Just a great, great company." As Dylan Byers reports:

The ad is part of an independent-expenditure campaign with no coordination between the paper and the campaign, according to a statement from The Seattle Times. The ad appears on page B6 and says [Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob] McKenna is a "choice that will make us all proud" and praises the candidate's time as Washington state's attorney general. The advertisement states that "no candidate authorized this ad. It is paid for by The Seattle Times Company."

Try telling an old, long-time Seattle Times reader that a Seattle Times Company endorsement in the Seattle Times is not in fact a Seattle Times endorsement but in fact an Seattle Times Company "advertising initiative." (Predictably, readers and journalists are angry.)

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Caroline Young (Chinese) - Love’s Devotion. Mixed Media
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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 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.

by Venkat, Ribbonfarm |  Read more:

Arnold
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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).

by Jeffrey A. Meyer, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Kelsey Dake

Melissa Sarat
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Franco Matticchio (b. 1957)
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The List

[ed. A story with a few angles, some quite humorous.]

Kennebunk, Me. -- The summer people who clog the roads here are long gone and the leaves have turned crimson and orange, but the prevailing sentiment in this postcard-perfect coastal town these days is one of dread.

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

Going Gently Into That Good Night

If you’re dying and don’t care to wait around for death, you can always book your own appointment. One simple way to do this would be to stop eating and drinking; another would be to stop life-sustaining medicine or devices. Assuming you can decide on your own, both of these methods are good and kosher as far as the law goes. A third approach, however, ventures into a grayer area of legal and ethical terrain—quaffing a lethal cocktail. In the business of ending your life, the means matter a lot more than the final result.

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:

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GM Mouse Created to Detect Landmines

[ed. I wonder what other "modifications" are being explored to achieve specific objectives.]

Scientists have genetically modified mice to enable them to sniff out landmines. They hope the GM mouse, known as MouSensor, could one day become a useful tool to help deal with the dangerous legacies of past wars.

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