Chiều trên phố (by Cường Đỗ Mạnh)
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Tracking the Trackers

The life of a politician in campaign mode is brutal. Go here, say this, go there, say that, smile, smile, smile, smile, shake hands, remember policy positions, learn new policy positions, learn talking points, learn names, attend the next rally, the next 7 a.m. breakfast, the next evening debate, the next lunchtime forum, keep your bladder in check, keep your libido in check, kiss ass, kiss babies, kiss spouse who is perfect and without whom etc., fundraise, fundraise, fundraise, and through all of it, never make a mistake, ever.

Not easy. But now consider the job of the person who has to constantly follow this politician around. Not this politician's pen- and Purell-carrying body man. Not the spokesperson who keeps the media at bay. Someone else. Someone from the opposing party, someone whose job is literally just to follow this politician everywhere and record everything that happens. The tracker.

If it takes a certain kind of fanatical drive to be a politician running for high office—and it does—then it takes a slightly different but equally fanatical drive to be the person who watches that politician, day in and day out, for an entire campaign season. It takes a guy like, say, Keith Schipper.

Schipper is 25 years old, he's a Republican, and on this day in March he's trying to talk his way into an event being put on by the Democratic candidate for governor, Jay Inslee, in an office park in Kent. Schipper's small Canon HD video camera is stashed in the pocket of his coat, ready to be pulled out in an instant. His rap about the people's right to know is cued up.

No dice. Inslee's people made Schipper the second he walked in the door. They've researched him, and they've researched their rights. This green-vehicle-manufacturing company is unquestionably private property, and Schipper's not welcome.

He gets the boot and gamely heads back to his messy green Nissan Pathfinder. No big loss. There will be a public Inslee event soon, no doubt, and Schipper will be there, by rights un-ejectable. I follow him out into the parking lot because I'm curious, and as Schipper drives off, I notice a University of Washington sticker on his back window.

Schipper studied political science and philosophy at the UW. I know what he studied because I decided to track Schipper a bit after that first encounter. Researched his history. Watched him at political events. Noted the tin of chew he keeps in the right pocket of his pants. Followed his Twitter feed, where he talks of "pounding Monsters on a long drive home from Spokane" and boasts that "sicking the police on a bunch of #UW students may very well end up being my most favorite thing I did in this election cycle."

I didn't just track him surreptitiously. I tried to get an interview with Schipper through his bosses at the state Republican Party but was ignored. I also tried to message him through Facebook. No answer. But that was fine. As Schipper knows, a core truth of tracker life is that the person you're following will show up in public eventually.

It's odd, though, the coyness of trackers. They're supposedly devoted to the idea that nothing should be hidden from the voters anymore, but they're not exactly eager to have themselves described to voters. Maybe it's because they don't want to become the story and distract from whatever campaign narrative they're trying to push. Maybe they know that tracking comes off as unseemly to a lot of people. Maybe they want to try to avoid having "Shame on you!" shouted at them at events, as happened to a Democratic tracker in Florida recently (video seemed to show her leaving the event, a memorial for Vietnam veterans, crying). Or perhaps it's just that trackers are so intimately familiar with how quickly one captured moment can come to define a person—like the moment that solidified the current obsession with tracking candidates, Republican Senate candidate George Allen's "Macaca Moment" on the campaign trail in Virginia several elections ago.

On that day in August 2006, at a campaign stop, Allen pointed at a Democratic tracker who had been following him everywhere and who happened to be Indian American. He said, "This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca or whatever his name is, he's with my opponent, he's following us around everywhere." Video of Allen losing his cool went viral, he lost the election, and the rest is tracker history.

It's the kind of moment all trackers now hope to capture, a moment not unlike the one that a certain still-anonymous individual captured earlier this year at a private Romney fundraiser in Florida at which the candidate talked about 47 percent of Americans acting like "victims" who can't be bothered to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives." And just like the person who captured that "47 percent" remark, most trackers (and their handlers) remain reluctant to take a bow in public. When I called the state Democratic Party and asked them to put me in touch with their gubernatorial tracker, Zach Wurtz—aka "Zach the Track"—no one was very excited about the idea. But I kept shaking the tree, and one day earlier this month, I got a text from Wurtz telling me that he would be at an upcoming forum featuring Inslee and the Republican candidate for governor, Rob McKenna. I made it my business to be there.

by Eli Sanders, The Stranger |  Read more:
Photo: Kelly O

Robert Glasper

Your Employee Is an Online Celebrity. Now What Do You Do?

Meet your newest management headache: the co-branded employee.

A growing number of professionals are using social media to build a personal, public identity—a brand of their own—based on their work. Think of an accountant who writes a widely read blog about auditing, or a sales associate who has attracted a big following online by tweeting out his store's latest deals.

Co-branded employees may exist largely below the radar now, but that's changing fast, and employers need to start preparing for the ever-greater challenges they pose for managers, co-workers and companies. Their activities can either complement a company's own brand image or clash with it. Companies that fail to make room for co-branded employees—or worse yet, embrace them without thinking through the implications—risk alienating or losing their best employees, or confusing or even burning their corporate brand.

Part of this change is generational. Younger employees show up on the job with an existing social-media presence, which they aren't about to abandon—especially since they see their personal brands lasting longer than any single job or career.

Social-media services like LinkedIn and Facebook also encourage users to build networks and share their professional as well as personal expertise. And increasingly, companies are recognizing that these activities have a business value. When a management consultant leads a large LinkedIn group, he builds a valuable source of referrals and recruitment prospects; when a lawyer tweets the latest legal news, she positions her firm as the go-to experts in that field. How can an employer resist?

And yet, there is a downside: Co-branded employees can raise tough questions about how to contain their online activities—and how to compensate them. It also isn't easy for managers to balance responsibilities among the bloggers and nonbloggers within a team. And it takes an effort to make sure employees' brands align with the company's.

To ensure that co-branded employees benefit a company, rather than undermine it, managers need to consider these questions:

by Alexandra Samuel, WSJ |  Read more:
Illustration: Viktor Koen

America Gone Wild

This year, Princeton, N.J., has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town's herd of 550 over the winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia, S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its drainage systems of beavers and their dams. The 2009 "miracle on the Hudson," when US Airways flight 1549 had to make an emergency landing after its engines ingested Canada geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the $60 million A320 Airbus was a complete loss. In the U.S., the total cost of wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds $28 billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people and wildlife.

The resurgence of wildlife in the U.S. has led to an increase in conflict between wildlife and people.

Those conflicts often pit neighbor against neighbor. After a small dog in Wheaton, Ill., was mauled by a coyote and had to be euthanized, officials hired a nuisance wildlife mitigation company. Its operator killed four coyotes and got voice-mail death threats. A brick was tossed through a city official's window, city-council members were peppered with threatening emails and letters, and the FBI was called in. After Princeton began culling deer 12 years ago, someone splattered the mayor's car with deer innards.

Welcome to the nature wars, in which Americans fight each other over too much of a good thing—expanding wildlife populations produced by our conservation and environmental successes. We now routinely encounter wild birds and animals that our parents and grandparents rarely saw. As their numbers have grown, wild creatures have spread far beyond their historic ranges into new habitats, including ours. It is very likely that in the eastern United States today more people live in closer proximity to more wildlife than anywhere on Earth at any time in history.

In a world full of eco-woes like species extinctions, this should be wonderful news—unless, perhaps, you are one of more than 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, or your child's soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, or feral cats have turned your bird feeder into a fast-food outlet, or wild turkeys have eaten your newly planted seed corn, or beavers have flooded your driveway, or bears are looting your trash cans. And that's just the beginning.

by Jim Sterba, WSJ |  Read more:

Illustration: Jesse Lenz

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The Art of Waiting

It's spring when I realize that I may never have children, and around that time the thirteen-year cicadas return, burrowing out of neat, round holes in the ground to shed their larval shells, sprout wings, and fly to the treetops, filling the air with the sound of their singular purpose: reproduction. In the woods where I live, an area mostly protected from habitat destruction, the males’ mating song, a vibrating, whooshing, endless hum, a sound at once faraway and up-close, makes me feel like I am living inside a seashell.

Near the river, where the song is louder, their discarded larval shells—translucent amber bodies, weightless and eerie—crunch underfoot on my daily walks. Across the river, in a nest constructed near the top of a tall, spindly pine, bald eagles take turns caring for two new eaglets. Baby turtles, baby snakes, and ducklings appear on the water. Under my parents’ porch, three feral cats give birth in quick succession. And on the news, a miracle pregnancy: Jamani, an eleven-year-old female gorilla at the North Carolina Zoo, is expecting, the first gorilla pregnancy there in twenty-two years. (...)

Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating dance. Bald eagle parents, who mate for life and share the responsibility of rearing young, will sometimes look on impassively as the stronger eaglet kills its sibling. At the end of their life cycle, after swimming thousands of miles in salt water, Pacific salmon swim up their natal, freshwater streams to spawn, while the fresh water decays their flesh. Animals will do whatever it takes to ensure reproductive success.

For humans, “whatever it takes” has come to mean in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure developed in the 1970s that involves the hormonal manipulation of a woman’s cycle followed by the harvest and fertilization of her eggs, which are transferred as embryos to her uterus. Nearly 4 million babies worldwide have been born through IVF, which has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

“Test-tube baby,” says another woman at the infertility support group, a young ER doctor who has given herself five at-home inseminations and is thinking of moving on to IVF. “I really hate that term. It’s a baby. That’s all it is.” She has driven seventy miles to talk to seven other women about the stress and isolation of infertility.

In the clinics, they call what the doctors and lab technicians do ART—assisted reproductive technology—softening the idea of the test-tube baby, the lab-created human. Art is something human, social, nonthreatening. Art does not clone or copy, but creates. It is often described as priceless, timeless, healing. It is far from uncommon to spend large amounts of
money on art. It’s an investment.

All of these ideas soothe, whether we think them through or not, just as the experience of treating infertility, while often painful and undignified, soothes as well. For the woman, treating infertility is about nurturing her body, which will hopefully produce eggs and a rich uterine lining where a fertilized egg could implant. All of the actions she might take in a given month—abstaining from caffeine and alcohol, taking Clomid or Femara, injecting herself with Gonal-f or human chorionic gonadotropin, charting her temperature and cervical mucus on a specialized calendar—are essentially maternal, repetitive, and self-sacrificing. In online message boards, where women gather to talk about their Clomid cycles and inseminations and IVF cycles, a form of baby talk is used to discuss the organs and cells of the reproductive process. Ovarian follicles are “follies,” embryos are “embies,” and frozen embryos—the embryos not used in an IVF cycle, which are frozen for future tries—are “snowbabies.” The frequent ultrasounds given to women in a treatment cycle, which monitor the growth of follicles and the endometrial lining, are not unlike the ultrasounds of pregnant women in the early stages of pregnancy. There is a wand, a screen, and something growing.

And always: something more to do, something else to try. It doesn’t take long, in an ART clinic, to spend tens of thousands of dollars on tests, medicine, and procedures. When I began to wonder why I could not conceive, I said the most I would do was read a book and chart my temperature. My next limit was pills: I would take them, but no more than that. Next was intrauterine insemination, a relatively inexpensive and low-tech procedure that requires no sedation. Compared to the women in my support group, women who leave the room to give themselves injections in the hospital bathroom, I’m a lightweight. Often during their discussions of medications and procedures I have no idea what they’re talking about, and part of the reason I attend each month is to listen to their horror stories. I’m hoping to detach from the process, to see what I could spare myself if I gave up.

But after three years of trying, it’s hard to give up. I know that it would be better for the planet if I did (if infinitesimally so), better for me, in some ways, as a writer. Certainly giving up makes financial sense. Years ago, when I saw such decisions as black or white, ight or wrong, I would have felt it was selfish and wasteful to spend thousands of dollars on unnecessary medical procedures. Better, the twenty-two-year-old me would have argued, to donate the money to an orphanage or a children’s hospital. Better to adopt.

The thirty-four-year-old me has careful but limited savings, knows how difficult adoption is, and desperately wants her body to work the way it is supposed to.

by Belle Boggs, Orion | Read more:

Art: Lorna Stevens

Kenton Nelson, Time Out
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Hernan Marin  personjeles 
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Once the Wild is Gone

Conservationists love charismatic species such as elephants. They appear on brochures, websites, and logos. The catastrophic decline in elephant numbers due to illegal hunting in the 1970s (and again now) provides one of the longest-running and most clear-cut stories about the plight of wildlife in the modern world. Who could forget the images of elephant carcasses, with their tusks removed, rotting in the bush? Or the huge pile of confiscated ivory set on fire by Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya’s President, in 1989?

Tourists also love elephants, and wildlife holidays in game reserves and parks offer a deeply romantic experience of wild creatures and people in apparent harmony in a remote, unspoiled land. In establishing protected areas for species such as elephants, conservation creates special places where the normal destructive rules of engagement between people and nature do not seem to apply.

However, nature reserves and national parks — or, in broad terms, ‘protected areas’ — are much more than a romantic idea. In the Anthropocene era, humankind is an increasingly dominant ecological force across the planet, from the tropics to the poles. Biodiversity is in decline everywhere, and the human impact on nature includes over-harvesting and overfishing, agricultural intensification and the growth of cities, toxic chemicals, ocean acidification, climate change, and many others. There is a real possibility of reaching ‘tipping points’, or changes that cause permanent shifts in the state of global ecological systems.

The loss of global biodiversity is the focus of huge efforts by charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, and governments. The nature of the challenge is widely researched and, broadly, well-understood, yet international biodiversity targets are not being met. Recognising this, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity pledged in 2010 to create more and better protected areas (at sea as well as on land). This is the familiar strategy of setting aside spaces for nature, which has dominated modern conservation since the late 19th century. (...)

Part of the problem is biological. Protected areas such as national parks do help preserve the animals and plants inside them, if the areas are large enough. Yet, despite the fact that there has been a huge increase in both the number and extent of protected areas through the 20th century, biodiversity loss has continued apace, accelerating in many regions. What is going wrong?

The problem is that protected areas become ecological islands. In the 1960s, a famous series of experiments on patterns of extinction and immigration were conducted in the islets of the Florida Keys by EO Wilson and his student Daniel Simberloff. Their findings became the basis of the ‘theory of island biogeography’. Simply put, islands lose species: the smaller the island, the faster they are lost. Since then, ecologists have recognised that these islands of habitat need not be surrounded by a sea of water. In Amazonia, ecologists conducted experiments on land that had been converted from forest to farms: islands of trees in a sea of dirt. They preserved square blocks of forest of different dimensions and studied the effect on diversity. Edge effects — the increase of sun, wind and weeds at the boundary between forest and cleared land — changed the microclimate of the forest, and species were lost. The smaller the remnant forest patch, the faster the species disappeared.

Landscape ecology, the science of animal populations, and studies of ecological networks all point the same way. Small protected areas surrounded by land without suitable habitat will not be sufficient to protect global biodiversity. And for large mammals, a park that is ‘too small’ might in fact be very large indeed. One of the greatest conservation challenges in Africa is to manage elephants, whose enormous ranges cannot be contained even in the greatest of parks.

One response is to seek more and bigger reserves, or to build corridors between them (‘more, bigger, better and joined’ was the slogan of a UK Government report Making Space for Nature in 2010). Yet, at most, a protected area strategy will create biodiverse islands on a fraction of the Earth’s surface (perhaps 17 per cent) leaving the rest of the Earth (to which humanity is restricted) radically transformed, and perhaps permanently impoverished in diversity.

Science is not the only critic of protected areas. They are often resisted and subverted by the people who have to live with them as neighbours. To understand why so many people around the world feel a burning resentment of protected areas from which they are excluded, we need to know more about their history, which starts in the 19th century — the heyday of empire and expansion of the Western world.

by Bill Adams, Aeon |  Read more:
Photo by Dominic Nahr/Magnum

The Parenting Trap

Under no circumstances are you to cut this out and stick it on the fridge door. Or put it in the file marked “Kids’ Stuff.” There’s nothing here for you. Nothing to do, nothing to act on. No consciousness-raising or attitude-flipping. No strategies or slogans. There is no help. And absolutely no solace. Because, really, what the world doesn’t need now is any more advice on raising children. We’re done with the finger wagging and the head patting. We’ve tried everything and we’ve read everything. We’ve asked, tweeted, blogged, prayed, and read it all. We’ve sat up at night and commiserated with other parents when we should have been having sex or at least paying off the sleep deficit. We’ve done everything, and still it’s like a cinnamon-and-lavender-scented Gettysburg out there.

Why don’t we just stop trying and do nothing? Because nothing can’t make us and the kids feel any worse than we feel now.

I have two lots of kids, a boy and a girl and a boy and a girl. They neatly bookend my responsibilities as a parent. The eld­er girl is in her last year of college. The youngest two are just starting the times table and phonetics, and the older boy is somewhere in Southeast Asia, on what he calls his “gap life,” collecting infections and tattoos of what he thinks are Jim Morrison lyrics written in pretty, curly, local lan­guages but in fact probably say, “I like cock.”

Having spent a great deal of money to educate the first two, I realized along the way that I’ve learned nothing. But then, none of us have any idea what we’re doing. That’s right, none of us know anything. I stand at the school gates and watch the fear in the eyes of other fathers. The barely contained panic as they herd their offspring, already looking like hobbit Sherpas, carrying enormous schoolbags full of folders and books and photocopied letters and invitations to birthdays and concerts and playdates and football and after-school math clubs. You know my younger kids carry more paperwork than I do? And my job is paperwork. And they can’t read.

In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bu­reauc­racy, and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it. Parents have no ra­tion­al defense against the byzantine demands of the education-industrial complex. But this multi-national business says that they’re acting in the children’s best interests. And we can only react emotionally to the next Big Idea or the Cure or the Shortcut to Happiness.

by A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photos: Left, from Classic Stock/The Image Works, Right, Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark.

Exposing Your Personal Information – There’s An App for That

Mobile devices and applications are no longer an accessory – they’re central to our daily lives. Gartner predicts the number of mobile apps downloaded will double to 45 billion this year – and they’re only getting smarter. Today’s apps are increasingly essential to accessing critical business applications, connecting with friends on the go and even adopting digital wallets.

While these apps make our lives easier, they also give a wider group of application developers and advertising networks the ability to collect information about our activities and leverage the functionality of our devices. At the same time, the companies, consumers and government employees who install these apps often do not understand with who and how they are sharing personal information. Even though a list of permissions is presented when installing an app, most people don’t understand what they are agreeing to or have the proper information needed to make educated decisions about which apps to trust.

More concerning is that many apps collect information or require permissions unnecessary for the described functionality of the apps. This is not the first time this issue has surfaced – reports of popular apps collecting irrelevant information or transmitting data when devices are turned off has led to significant backlash. However, less is known about the state of privacy across the entire application ecosystem.

To get a sense of the state of application privacy today, Juniper Networks’ Mobile Threat Center (MTC) analyzed over 1.7 million apps on the Google Play market from March 2011 to September 2012.

Topline Findings

We found a significant number of applications contain permissions and capabilities that could expose sensitive data or access device functionality that they might not need. We also determined these apps had permission to access the Internet, which could provide a means for exposed data to be transmitted from the device. Of particular interest, free applications were much more likely to access personal information than paid applications. Specifically, free apps are 401 percent more likely to track location and 314 percent more likely to access user address books than their paid counterparts.

• 24.14 percent of free apps have permission to track user location, while only 6.01 percent of paid apps have this ability;
• 6.72 percent of free apps have permission to access user address books, while 2.14 percent of paid apps do;
• 2.64 percent of free apps have permission to silently send text messages, whereas 1.45 percent of paid apps can;
• 6.39 percent of free apps have permission to clandestinely initiate calls in the background, while only 1.88 percent of paid apps do; and
• 5.53 percent of free apps have permission to access the device camera, whereas only 2.11 percent of paid apps have this access.

by Daniel Hoffman, Juniper Networks |  Read more:

Joe Leavenworth
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On Point, in Their Jeans and Sneakers

[ed. Repost of an extraordinary performance. Lil Buck (with Yo-Yo Ma).]

On Point in Their Jeans and Sneakers.
Alastair Macaulay, NY Times

Japanese Colour Woodcut ca.1790, Unknown Artist
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It Doesn't Mean We're Wasting Our Time

It Doesn't Mean We're Wasting Our Time
~ Frank Cassese: Reflections on a Postcard from David Foster Wallace

Massive Attack

How the Internet Economy Works: Bandwidth

The internet is made of thousands of networks, and a complex web of economic considerations has developed to support the free flow of information. How bandwidth is “manufactured” and then allocated is far more complex than how a packet gets from here to there.

Most people know certain things about the Internet. They know that cables run under the sea, that wires come into your homes, and that modems carry the digital signals to your devices.

But they’ve probably never heard of Internet Exchange Points, and that’s where the magic of the Internet really happens.

Internet Exchange Points (aka IXPs) are the manufacturing floor of the Internet — that is where bandwidth is created and deployed. And bandwidth is just like water and oil and other economic goods: If your country has a lot of it, prices fall; if it doesn’t have a surplus, prices go up. And that has a big impact on the web companies that buy bandwidth.

The Netherlands, for example, is a large net-exporter of Internet bandwidth, using only half of what it produces domestically. That means that large companies like Disney, Google and Netflix can buy ports there at rates that are significantly lower than in some other places and that have dropped by 50 percent in the last year. But where there isn’t an Internet Exchange Point and competition can’t flourish, prices remain high. That’s what you see in places like Mexico. More on that below.

Though Internet Exchange Points are a key building block of the Internet economy, you’d never guess it from where they’re located. They don’t remotely resemble other temples of commerce. You don’t see people standing in them yelling at each other, like you would at a stock exchange. Instead, they can be located inside a beat-up building near a railroad track. Sometimes there’s not a single human being in the vicinity.

A report I covered earlier from the OECD lays out in awesomely clear detail why Internet exchange points are so essential for every geography that values the Internet. They not only facilitate the creation of bandwidth, they lower the cost of transit/bandwidth for businesses and consumers and help create redundant networks and limit or diminish the power of monopoly telecommunications providers.

by Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM | Read more:

Photo: Om Malik