Secret of Googlenomics

In the midst of financial apocalypse, the gadflies and gurus of the global marketplace are gathered at the San Francisco Hilton for the annual meeting of the American Economics Association. The mood is similar to a seismologist convention in the wake of the Big One. Yet surprisingly, one of the most popular sessions has nothing to do with toxic assets, derivatives, or unemployment curves.

"I'm going to talk about online auctions," says Hal Varian, the session's first speaker. Varian is a lanky 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and School of Information, but these days he's best known as Google's chief economist. This morning's crowd hasn't come for predictions about the credit market; they want to hear about Google's secret sauce.

Varian is an expert on what may be the most successful business idea in history: AdWords, Google's unique method for selling online advertising. AdWords analyzes every Google search to determine which advertisers get each of up to 11 "sponsored links" on every results page. It's the world's biggest, fastest auction, a never-ending, automated, self-service version of Tokyo's boisterousTsukiji fish market, and it takes place, Varian says, "every time you search." He never mentions how much revenue advertising brings in. But Google is a public company, so anyone can find the number: It was $21 billion last year.

His talk quickly becomes technical. There's the difference between the Generalized Second Price auction model and the Vickrey-Clark-Groves alternative. Game theory takes a turn; so does the Nash Equilibrium. Terms involving the c-word—as in clicks—get tossed around like beach balls at a summer rock festival. Clickthrough rate. Cost per click. Supply curve of clicks. The audience is enthralled.

During the question-and-answer period, a man wearing a camel-colored corduroy blazer raises his hand. "Let me understand this," he begins, half skeptical, half unsure. "You say that an auction happens every time a search takes place? That would mean millions of times a day!"

Varian smiles. "Millions," he says, "is actually quite an understatement."

by Steven Levy, Wired | Read more:

The monkey appeared behind a Bennigan’s. The Bennigan’s was one in a row of free-standing, fast-casual joints in Clearwater, Fla., just outside Tampa, that also includes a Panda Express and a Chipotle. At one end, a Perkins Family Restaurant flies a preposterously large Stars and Stripes in its front yard, as if it were a federal building or an aircraft carrier.

Someone spotted the monkey poking through a Dumpster around lunchtime. When a freelance animal trapper named Vernon Yates arrived, all he could make out was an oblong ball of light brown fur, asleep in the crown of an oak. It was a male rhesus macaque — a pink-faced, two-foot-tall species native to Asia. It weighed about 25 pounds.

No pet macaques were reported missing around Tampa Bay — there wasn’t even anyone licensed to own one in the immediate area. Yates, who is called by the state wildlife agency to trap two or three monkeys a year, was struck by how “streetwise” this particular one seemed. Escaped pet monkeys tend to cower and stumble once they’re out in the unfamiliar urban environment, racing into traffic or frying themselves in power lines. But as Yates loaded a tranquilizer dart into his rifle, this animal jolted awake, swung out of the canopy and hit the ground running. It made for the neighboring office park, where it catapulted across a roof and reappeared, sitting smugly in another tree, only to vanish again. Yates was left dumbstruck, balancing at the top of a ladder. (By then, a firetruck had been called in to assist him.) “There’s no way to describe how intelligent this thing is,” he told me recently.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (known as the F.W.C.) came to believe that the macaque wasn’t a pet but had wandered out of a small population of free-roaming, wild macaques that live in a forest along the Silver River, 100 miles away. Soon, the F.W.C. was warning that wild macaques can carry the herpes B virus, which, though not easily transmitted to humans, can be fatal. A spokesman also told the press, “They’re infamous for throwing feces at things they don’t like.”

As sightings stacked up in the following days, it became clear that the macaque was crossing the highway again and again, threading traffic like a running back. One afternoon, Yates and an F.W.C. investigator named James Manson managed to dart the animal in a church parking lot but lost track of it before the drug took effect. At one point, the two men were staring into tangled brush, stumped, when Manson tilted his head and saw the monkey perched with ninja-like stillness above him, close enough to touch. The two primates locked eyes. Then the monkey turned and was gone. “And that’s really when the story began,” Manson told me.

And on it went, with the monkey zigging and zagging around Tampa Bay, dodging the government agencies bent on capturing it. The state considers the animal a potential danger to humans and, like all invasive species, an illegitimate and maybe destructive part of Florida’s ecology. But the public came to see the monkey as an outlaw, a rebel — a nimble mascot for “good, old-fashioned American freedom,” as one local reporter put it. (...)

Vernon Yates is 59, with a broad, serious face and white-threaded hair. He lives on the west side of Tampa Bay, in the suburb of Seminole. He came to open his front gate wearing camouflage crocs and khaki shorts, throwing on a Jack Hanna-style khaki shirt as he walked, but never going so far as to button it.

He’d been hosing down his bear cage when I rang. Yates has about 200 exotic animals at his house. Most are pets that the F.W.C. confiscated from owners who failed to comply with state regulations and then entrusted to Yates’s one-man nonprofit, Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation. There were 17 tigers, some leopards, cougars, a pile of alligators in a concrete pool and a dusty battalion of large African spurred tortoises. Yates likes tortoises — he also keeps a single Galápagos tortoise as a pet. “I’ve been married five times,” he told me. “In one of my divorces, I lost $100,000 worth of tortoises.”

At his desk, Yates unfolded a map of Tampa Bay. But he found he had to flip the map over, then consult other maps, at different scales, to trace the macaque’s entire odyssey. “It’s an amazing feat, when you think about his travels,” he said. Since 2009, Yates estimates that he has gone after the animal on roughly 100 different occasions. The monkey was his white whale. He claimed to have darted it at least a dozen times, steadily upping the tranquilizer dosage, to no avail. The animal is too wily — it retreats into the woods and sleeps off the drug. A few times, the monkey stared Yates right in the eye and pulled the dart out.

For the last two years, the macaque seems to have lingered in the same area of South St. Petersburg, ranging between a bulbous peninsula and the small island of Coquina Key, about two miles away. Yates still received calls about the animal — one came in the previous week. But the trail went cold a long time ago. Sightings were seldom reported now. As a woman on Coquina Key named Rosalie Broten told me: “Nobody wants the monkey to be captured. Everybody wants it to be free.”

The citizenry of Tampa Bay was adamantly pro-monkey. People had long been abetting the animal, leaving fruit plates on their patios. A few people, one F.W.C. officer told me, called the agency’s monkey hot line to report that they’d seen the macaque several hours or even a couple of days earlier — offering totally useless intelligence, in other words, presumably just to stick their thumbs in the government’s eye. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay, as people called it, had very quickly become a celebrity. There were at least two styles of Mystery Monkey T-shirts on offer, and a catchphrase: Go, Monkey, Go. As the macaque passed through the town of Oldsmar, a self-storage facility threw the monkey’s picture on a digital billboard with the message: “Stay Free Mystery Monkey.” And a Facebook page for the animal got 82,000 likes. “The taxpaying citizens of Tampa have been driven bananas by the out-of-touch political establishment,” the monkey wrote on its blog at the end of 2010, announcing its run for mayor.

by John Mooallem, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration by Tim Enthoven

An Unexpected Fix

One of the truisms about addiction is that people ingest narcotics to fill some kind of existential void or emptiness inside themselves. Often that emptiness evolves not just out of, say, a lack of parental love, but also out of the tragic loss of contact with nature. Now a recognised phenomenon called ‘nature deficit disorder’, it seems to me one convincing reason, among others, for the epidemic of drug addiction. Perhaps that’s why care farms and forest schools are suddenly booming. People are waking up to the fact that losing contact with nature can be as damaging as losing contact with relatives and friends.

Living in a woodland in deepest, darkest Somerset, our guests certainly get their fill of nature. We don’t deliberately give them demeaning jobs, but being knee-deep in pig shit, or building a compost loo, puts you in direct contact with the earthy realities of life. And reality, as the actress Lily Tomlin once quipped, ‘is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs’.

A corollary of that earthy reality is that, instead of being, in the old-fashioned phrase, ‘opium-eaters’, some of our guests eat a healthy dose of humble pie. And humility, as in 12-step AA orthodoxy, is the first step of the cure. Addicts often have a paradoxical combination of low self-esteem and massive ego, so recognising that they are ‘powerless’ over a substance is a vital reminder that they’re not super beings, just precious, weak humans, along with the rest of us.

AA is, of course, a much-debated institution. Founded in Ohio in 1935, it now has more than 2 million adherents and has been the model for dozens of other ‘Anonymous’ movements. Based on mutuality, it has no organisational structure to speak of, and yet it’s often accused of being cultish and controlling. Inspired by the ‘Oxford Group’ of Christians, it has always maintained that addiction is a ‘spiritual malady’ for which the only cure is conversion. Step three explicitly describes handing over responsibility for your recovery ‘to the care of God’. The AA’s ‘big book’ deliberately looks like a Bible, with its blue ribbon to mark a favourite passage. Those in recovery can invariably quote chapter and verse, and at the core of the book is that image of two evangelists — Dr Bob and Bill W — who went out into a darkness to spread the good news.

Research into the effectiveness of AA is notoriously unreliable (partly because of the anonymity that it promises). Recent studies suggest that it is no more or less successful than other behaviour treatments. But because AA was the first, and most famous, treatment programme, its influence on the wider recovery movement has been immense.

Most notably, AA’s notion that alcoholism is a disease — ‘a cunning, baffling and powerful disease’, as the big book puts it — has meant that for decades addiction has been seen in medical terms. This is something addicts yearn to hear, because seeing addiction as a disease allows a degree of self-forgiveness. It suits the medical profession too, because, in the scathing words of the psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple in Junk Medicine (2007), it creates ‘employment opportunities’ for the ‘therapeutic juggernaut’. It’s easier, he writes with sadness, ‘to give people a dose of medicine than to give them a reason for living’. So heroin-users are prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute famously invented by Nazis, and potentially as addictive and often fatal as the thing it’s supposed to replace. But the medicalisation of addiction also suits politicians. The Nixon administration in the US was the first to flood the market with methadone in 1970 and, ever since then, it’s been seen as a politically expedient substance: not because it reduces addiction, but because it reduces crime.

There are now, however, stirrings of a backlash against the consensus. (...)

To my mind the great drawback of medicalising addiction is that it actually obscures AA’s subtler diagnosis of a ‘spiritual malady’. It’s not, perhaps, surprising that in our secular age the spiritual tag is touted less often than the ‘disease’ one. And yet the degree to which recovery is considered a spiritual experience is evident when reading some of the best books on the subject: Bruce Alexander’s The Globalisation of Addiction (2008), subtitle: ‘A Study in Poverty of the Spirit’; Richard Rohr’s Breathing Underwater (1989), subtitle: ‘Spirituality and the 12 Steps’; or Gerald G May’s Addiction and Grace(2007), subtitle: ‘Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions’.

Even a cynic such as Russell Brand, in his maverick and moving BBC3 documentary From Addiction to Recovery said that rehab ushered in a ‘profound spiritual change’ and that he rediscovered ‘love and compassion’. Abraham Twerski, the American psychiatrist and rabbi, has worked with addicts all his life and he, too, insists on the immaterial, or metaphysical, nature of recovery. ‘I know without doubt that the source of addiction is spiritual deficiency,’ he has written. ‘Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings are spiritual by nature, and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery.’

The theory, broadly, is that addiction isn’t merely a physical craving for a substance, but a means by which damaged souls, severed from family, tribal, cultural and spiritual ties, address their sense of being dislocated, isolated and atomised in an atmosphere of superspeed capitalism and acute consumer competitiveness. We’re obsessed with ourselves and what we’ve got. We don’t talk about vocations and callings, but about careers and pay-packets. Being responsible implies a response to something, but we struggle because, in a cultural and spiritual vacuum, we’ve got nothing to which we can respond.

Fixing addiction, then, is much more complicated than weaning someone off a needle or bottle. Treatment needs to be holistic, dealing with an individual in the round. It’s not just about repairing a brain, or a vein, but about repairing relationships and the spirit. It sounds very highfalutin’ and, since we’re not professionals, we don’t really know how to do it. But then, nobody does. There’s no textbook about how to repair the spirit.

by Tobias Jones, Aeon |  Read more:

Photo: Kate Keara Pelen

Stefan Johansson (Swedish, 1876-1955), Shadows in the Bedroom Corner, 1944
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How important is the Fiscal Cliff for Investors? Hint: Not Very

The “fiscal cliff” paranoia continues unabated. Apparently, it is the only thing that matters to the markets. Every twist and turn in the negotiations is crucial to the future of the republic!

Whenever the media obsess over a potential crisis, history teaches us that it is most likely to be overwrought hype. Recall the Y2k frenzy as Exhibit 1 in The People v. Really Bad Mediaprosecution.

Want to learn just how absurdly obsessive the media have become over this? Just type “fiscal cliff” into Google Trends and you will see how, post-election, the term’s appearance in the media simply went ballistic.

Where did this sudden spike in mentions begin? The Columbia Journalism Review points to coverage such as that of the financial network CNBC. Ryan Chittum, who reports on the business media for CJR, notes that CNBC began a campaign called Rise Above that blanketed its airwaves since the day after the election with pleas for a solution to the fiscal cliff. As Google’s trend chart shows, it was part of a media dogpile — at least until the David Petraeus affair sent the drones scurrying after a more salacious story.

What does the fiscal cliff mean to investors?

Let’s start with a definition: The term refers to the deal that Congress made in late 2011 to temporarily resolve the debt ceiling debate. The “sequestration,” as it is known, calls for three elements: tax increases, spending cuts and an increase to the payroll tax (FICA). The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has run the numbers and finds “$180 billion from income tax hikes, $120 billion in revenue from the payroll tax, $110 billion from the sequester’s automatic spending cuts and $160 billion from expiring tax breaks and other programs.”

That is a not-insignificant amount of money, but it is hardly the end of the world. To put this into context, it is a little less than the TARP bailout for Wall Street in 2009 and somewhat less than the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama’s stimulus package. An educated guess puts this at about $600 billion to $700 billion out of a $15 trillion U.S. economy. I’d ballpark that at about 4 percent of the GDP, or 0.50 percent of the forecasted GDP growth of 2 percent for calendar year 2013.

The term “fiscal cliff,” popularized by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, is really a misnomer. As several analysts have correctly observed, the effects of sequestration are not a Jan. 1, 2013, event. The impact of the spending cuts and tax hikes would be phased in over time. A fiscal slope is more accurate. Additionally, as students of history have learned, single-variable analysis for complex financial issues is invariably wrong. Because of the inherent complexity of economies and markets, we cannot adequately explain or predict their behavior by merely looking at just one variable.

Given all this, what else might be driving equity markets? Consider the following factors as the causes of recent volatility:

Weak corporate profits: If you want to understand market jitters, look no further than falling earnings growth. Profits and revenue have disappointed in the third quarter, coming in below estimates. As the Wall Street Journal noted, this has been the “worst quarter for corporate profits in three years.” Even worse, future estimates for earnings growth keep sliding. In July, estimates for fourth-quarter profit were annualized gains of 14 percent. By October, that fell to 9.6 percent. It has now slipped to 5.5 percent, according to S&P Capital IQ.

by Barry Ritholtz, Washington Post |  Read more:

Photo via Mother Jones

Reply to a Dead Man

No one ever knocked at my door, and Rose was the only person I was acquainted with in the neighborhood. It had to be her, I thought; that was just cold hard logic.

So I opened the door looking down, expecting to see my diminutive neighbor’s wide face under a thatch of black hair turned gray.

Instead I was looking at the red-and-blue vest of a white man even taller than me. He had a bald head and not much facial hair. His skin was the color of yellowing ivory and his eyes were a luminous gray—like a mist-filled valley at dawn.

“Mr. Vaness?” the stranger asked, in a magnificent tenor voice.

“Yes?”

“My name is Harding, Lance Harding. I am here representing the last wish of Seth Vaness.”

“What?”

“I work for a small firm called Final Request Co. We execute the last wishes of clients who have passed on.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

I looked the slender tenor up and down. He had on a nice suit, but it was reddish-brown, not a lawyer’s color, in my estimation.

“No, Mr. Vaness. We at FRC don’t execute wills. Our job is to deliver messages from the dead.” He smiled after the last word, giving me a slight chill.

“Uh-huh. You use a Ouija board or somethin’?”

“We are engaged by the deceased before their demise.”

“My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?”

Harding smiled and nodded.

“He died six and a half months ago,” I said. “What took you so long?”

“His wish was for us to execute his instructions not less than half a year after his demise.”

“Is this some kinda legal thing?”

“It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,” Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. “Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.”

“Seth didn’t have much,” I said. “He couldn’t have anything to hide.”

“We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.”

by Walter Mosely, The Atlantic | Read more:

Photo: Bryce Duffy

10 Techniques for Making Cities More Walkable

In Jeff Speck’s excellent new book, Walkable City, he suggests that there are ten keys to creating walkability. Most of them also have something to do with redressing the deleterious effects caused by our allowing cars to dominate urban spaces for decades. I don’t necessarily agree with every detail, and my own list might differ in some ways that reflect my own experience and values. But it’s a heck of a good menu to get city leaders and thinkers started in making their communities more hospitable to walkers.

(I can’t say that Jeff and I know each other well, but we’re friends, and I like him a lot. I’m listed in the acknowledgments, and one of my articles is cited in the narrative. I previously reviewed The Smart Growth Manual, which Jeff co-authored with Andres Duany and Mike Lydon.)

Here are the author’s ten steps of walkability, with a memorable line from his description of each:

1. Put cars in their place. ("Traffic studies are bullshit.") Startling quote, no? Jeff believes, and I tend to agree, that a car-first approach has hurt American cities. This is in part because traffic engineers too often have failed to acknowledge that increased roadway traffic capacity can lead to more, not fewer, cars on the road. The resulting phenomenon of "induced demand" results in unanticipated consequences not only for traffic on freeways but especially in neighborhoods and downtowns, where streets are sometimes treated not as critical public spaces for animating city life but as conveyances for motor vehicles. Jeff generally supports congestion pricing, but cautions that we must be very careful about assuming the merits of pedestrian-only zones. (I think there are also circumstances where we must be very careful about congestion pricing, which I’ll discuss below.)

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Richard Masoner

2. Mix the uses. ("Cities were created to bring things together.") The research shows that neighborhoods with a diversity of uses – places to walk to – have significantly more walking than those that don’t. Jeff makes the point that, for most American downtowns, it is housing – places to walk from, if you will – that is in particularly short supply. He also points out, quite correctly, that for most (still-disinvested) downtowns, affordability is not much of an issue, because relatively affordable housing is all there is. For those booming downtowns susceptible to gentrification, he recommends inclusionary zoning and "granny flats," or accessory dwelling units.

3. Get the parking right. ("Ample parking encourages driving that would not otherwise occur without it.") As do many progressive city thinkers, Jeff points out that we have a huge oversupply of underpriced parking, in large part due to minimum parking requirements for buildings and businesses. A side effect is that adaptive reuse of historic properties can be discouraged, because there isn’t sufficient space to create parking required for the buildings’ new uses. Jeff recommends consolidated parking for multiple buildings and businesses and higher prices, especially for curb parking, and shares a number of successful examples.

by Kaid Benfield, Atlantic Cities |  Read more:

Photos: Kaid Benfield

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Massive Attack

Saul Leiter Shopper, 1953
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[ed. Hedonic adaptation: the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes (Wikipedia).]

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

by Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladoras (flying jewels) |  Read more:

Image: morfi jimenes mercado via:

Economic Bricolage

You don't need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead traders discover "heuristics," or rules of thumb, by trial and error. These are then formalized by academics into theorems and taught to new generations of traders, who become slaves to theory, ignore their own common sense and end by blowing up the system. In a neat echo of its own thesis, Mr. Taleb's paper making this point sat unpublished for seven years while academic reviewers tried to alter it to fit their prejudices.

Mr. Taleb, a former trader and expert on probability, tells this story in "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder" to illustrate the point that "we don't put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice." It is a startling insight, which he applies not just to finance but to medicine, science and philosophy. Successful medicine was a "craft built around experience-driven heuristics" that had to fight against entrenched, top-down theorizing from Galen and other wise fools.

Discovery is a trial and error process, what the French molecular biologist François Jacob called bricolage. From the textile machinery of the industrial revolution to the discovery of many pharmaceutical drugs, it was tinkering and evolutionary serendipity we have to thank, not design from first principles. Mr. Taleb systematically demolishes what he cheekily calls the "Soviet-Harvard" notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to—that is to say, that theories of how society works are necessary for society to work. Planning is inherently biased toward delay, complication and inflexibility, which is why companies falter when they get big enough to employ planners.

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat ruined entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers, Mr. Taleb thinks. The reason that restaurants are competitive is that they are constantly failing. A law that bailed out failing restaurants would result in disastrously dull food. The economic parallel hardly needs spelling out. (...)

Something that is fragile, like a glass, can survive small shocks but not big ones. Something that is robust, like a rock, can survive both. But robust is only half way along the spectrum. There are things that are anti-fragile, meaning they actually improve when shocked, they feed on volatility. The restaurant sector is such a beast. So is the economy as a whole: It is precisely because of Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" that it innovates, progresses and becomes resilient. The policy implications are clear: Bailouts risk making the economy more fragile.

Biological evolution, too, is anti-fragile. The death of unfit individuals is what causes a species to adapt and improve. The body is anti-fragile: Without stress it weakens. To build muscles, you must push them to the point of failure. Though he has no truck with homeopathy, Mr. Taleb is intrigued by hormesis, an old idea, now enjoying a revival, that a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial.

by Matt Ridley, WSJ |  Read more:

Rift.
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Stairway to Heaven

The Haiku Stairs, or the Stairway to Heaven, is a semi-secret forbidden hike on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The stairs were originally built in 1943 to install antenna cables as part of a larger military radio communication system to communicate with US Navy submarines as far away as Tokyo Bay. The original wooden steps were replaced by metal, cable-supported stairs in the early 1950s when the US Coast Guard took over the installation. 

According to Friends of Haiku Stairs, there are 3,922 steps.

The men who made the first ascent up Keahiakahoe in 1942 required 21 days to pioneer the route up the south wall of Haiku Valley. They considered it a "sissy's climb" when the way was made easier by laying wooden ladders along the trail, held in place by four-foot metal posts pounded into the lava cliffs. The ladders were later replaced by a wooden stairway. When the wooden stairs were done, the trip to the summit could be made in 3 1/2 hours. Ten years later, the wooden stairs were replaced by the galvanized steel stairway that was used until its closure in 1987. In spite of corrosion, shifting, and missing sections, a fit climber can now reach the top in two hours or less, passing remnants of the original wooden stairway cast off to the side.

The Haiku Stairs, however, are more than an artifact of World War II history. Climbers can experience a variety of micro-climates and ecological communities on the way up. Progressing from a disturbed area of mostly alien plants at the base, the Stairs ascend into a relatively undisturbed plant community, where more than 50 native plant species can be observed. On a clear day, the panorama of Windward Oahu opens to view, with glimpses to leeward through the mountain gaps. On a typical trade wind day, a full range of weather can set clouds swirling in motion, bringing sunshine and pouring rain, sometimes both at once. Much more information in sublinks at the organization's website. 

via: TYWKIWDBI
Photo credit, via The Soul is Bone.

The Best of It

The office park sat in a patch of desert eight miles off the Strip. I pulled the address out of my pocket. I hadn’t imagined gamblers doing business alongside divorce lawyers and accountants. In my denim miniskirt and Converse sneakers, I felt more like a teenage runaway than an interviewee. I pulled my hair out of its ponytail so that it fell over my shoulders and hid my bra straps.

I was twenty-four and had moved to Las Vegas to be with a guy I had been dating for a few months. We broke up soon after I arrived. I didn’t know a single person in town. But no one else seemed to either. It was 2001, and Vegas was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in America. Almost fifteen hundred people were moving into the city each week. Everyone I met was very much like me and had just ended up there.

After the breakup I rented a room in a motel just north of the Strip in a neighborhood known as Naked City. In the fifties it had been home to strippers who sunbathed in the nude to avoid tan lines. Now bail bondsmen, hookers, Vietnam vets, and irritable motel clerks added color to the place. My motel was within walking distance of the Little White Wedding Chapel and Johnny Tocco’s Boxing Gym and a short drive to the downtown casinos: Binion’s Horseshoe, the El Cortez, and the Aztec—home of the fifty-nine-cent strawberry shortcake. The cigarette burns in the motel’s bedspreads were big enough to fit a leg through, and the staccato of stilettos across the floor upstairs made it hard to get a good night’s sleep. But at seventeen dollars a night, it was affordable, and it allowed dogs. So Otis my sixty-pound chow chow and I moved in. The wooden nightstand showcased the room’s only decor: a Rand McNally Road Atlas and a Magic 8 Ball.

My odyssey through the sports-betting underworld, however, would considerably change my lifestyle. Though broke and having no idea how to place a bet, in four short years I would be working fifteen hour days as a figures girl at an offshore sportsbook in the Caribbean, living in a ranch house with a maid and a cook, taking meetings in an open-air strip club, and wiring money across international waters. But today, I just needed a job.

In a row of offices with signs like NEVADA INSURANCE and COLDWELL BANKER stood a suite with no sign and white plastic blinds covering its windows. Next to the door was a square address plaque and scrawled in its center, in Wite-Out correction pen, was DINK INC. From inside, a television blared. The sound of a bugle summoned horses to the starting gate at a racetrack. I knocked.

The door opened, revealing a guy about six foot four, 280 pounds. His hair was a heap of shiny, springy brown curls, the kind you see in ads for home perms. Tucked into his armpit was a Daily Racing Form, and in his hand was a puffy white bagel overstuffed with lox. He introduced himself as Dink, then took a bite of his sandwich. With mouth full he asked if my dog had an opinion on the Yankees game.

Dink was in his late forties, but his bashful smile and distracting habit of twisting his curls around his pointer finger made him appear much younger. He dressed like the adults with mental retardation I had met while volunteering at a group home. His Chicago Cubs T-shirt was two sizes too small for his expansive frame. Royal-blue elasticized cotton shorts were pulled high above his belly button. White tube socks were stretched to the middle of his pale, hairless shins.

Inside the suite, a long banquet table was cluttered: hockey digests, baseball encyclopedias, a baseball prospectus, sports pages from USA Today, the New York Post, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, dozens of calculators, telephones, mechanical pencils, computer monitors, and several copies of Fuzzy Creatures Quarterly, a magazine that offered tips on how to better love and care for one’s hamster, ferret, or guinea pig. At the front of the office, a tower of six forty-inch televisions balanced on a flimsy metal stand, each tuned to a different sport. Dink took his seat at the head of the table. In front of him, stacks of cash were piled as high as his bottle of Yoo-hoo. I stared at the money, mesmerized, and took a seat.

He nodded to one of the TVs, and in a heavy Queens accent he said, “We need Minnesoter and undah, for a decent amount.”

Having no idea what he was talking about, I said, “Okay.”

In the long silence that followed, Dink twirled and twirled his curls, engrossed in the basketball games and horse races. The action on TV reflected off his eyeglasses, which were as thick as hockey pucks and cloudy with thumbprints. Rising from the floor were stacks of books, all of which appeared to be on the subjects of hockey and New York punk bands, except for one on the very bottom: Hide Your A$et$ and Disappear: A Step-by-Step Guide to Vanishing Without a Trace.

On the TV, a player for Minnesota made two free throws. Unsure of whether or not this was a good thing for Dink, I stayed quiet and massaged Otis’ back with the bottom of my sneaker. Dink clicked the eraser of his mechanical pencil, then scribbled something down in his raggedy five-subject notebook. Then he took a swig of his Yoo-hoo and asked me what I knew about gambling.

by Beth Raymer, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Photo credit: unknown

Dean Crouser
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Mr. China Comes to America

Whether you call the business history of the past 15 years the age of hedge funds, the age of Google (or its rival Facebook, or its other rival Amazon, or its other rival Apple), the age of Walmart, or even the cautionary age of Lehman Brothers and Countrywide, in no case would you call it the age of American manufacturing. Manufacturing’s share of the total American economy has fallen by about the same amount as its workforce share: it went from about 20 percent in the early 1980s to just over 10 percent now. For comparison, manufacturing accounts for some 30 percent of China’s total economy. Still, the U.S. economy is so much larger that our manufacturing sector, even in its battered condition, remains the largest in the world.

I’m used to hearing excitement from people at American infotech companies—or from biotech innovators, or people in other enterprises who believe the future is on their side. I’m used to hearing it in China. I’ve gravitated to tech topics and to fast-growing parts of the world because I like hearing from people with big plans and dreams. And this year, for the first time in decades, I have been hearing upbeat accounts from business officials and entrepreneurs engaged in American manufacturing.

The heart of their argument is this: Through most of post–World War II history, the forces of globalization have made it harder and harder to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States. But the latest wave of technological innovation, communications systems, and production tools may now make it easier—especially to bring new products to market faster than the competition by designing, refining, and making them in the United States. At just the same time, social and economic changes in China are making the outsourcing business ever costlier and trickier for all but the most experienced firms.

For Americans, the most important factor is the emergence of new tools that address an old problem. The old problem is the cost, delay, and inefficiency of converting an idea into a product. Say you have an idea for—anything. (For me, the list would start with silent leaf blowers, which I’d give to all my neighbors as gifts.) Before you can earn the first dollar from the first customer, you have to decide whether the product can be built, at what cost, and how fast, so you can beat anyone else with the same idea.  (...)

For the past 30 years, all of the largest forces have pushed in favor of China’s manufacturing expansion, from very low labor costs and a deliberate policy of welcoming foreign investment, to ever faster and cheaper global cargo-shipment networks, to a deliberately undervalued Chinese currency. Within the past two years, nearly all of those advantages have become more complicated. (In his accompanying article for this issue, Charles Fishman explains some of the large forces pushing in favor of America’s manufacturing renewal.) In China, wages are rising, workers are becoming choosier, public resistance to environmental devastation is growing, and the Chinese “investment led” model is showing strain.

That model has involved a kind of hyper-Keynesianism far beyond what the United States experienced even during the most government-run periods of the New Deal. China has created jobs by building factories, highways, railroads, and dams—and airports where there are no cities, and cities where there are no people. “Americans are used to thinking of ‘savings’ and ‘investment’ as absolute goods, because we’ve done too little” of both, Michael Pettis, of the Guanghua School of Business in Beijing, told me. “But there is such a thing as too much savings and investment and infrastructure, and too little consumption, all of which we see in China.” If the American public challenge is “reinvestment” of all varieties—in education, in infrastructure, in a sense of community, in everything but houses—the Chinese counterpart is a need for a comprehensive rebalancing. Indeed, Pettis’s forthcoming book on the Chinese economy is called The Great Rebalancing. Reliance on exports needs to come into better balance with domestic consumption; economic growth with environmental sustainability; political liberties with the new level of economic prosperity; and on down a long list.

Some observers inside and outside China think that the strains are too great and the system too rigid to allow the necessary rebalancing in time for the party to maintain political control. For instance, Minxin Pei, a native of Shanghai who now teaches at Claremont McKenna College in California, has been warning for more than a decade that the economic, social, and political imbalances of the Chinese system would reach a breaking point just about now—and that Communist rule would have to give way to a multiparty system. Many others contend that, on the contrary, the Communist leaders will manage somehow to address each of today’s problems just before any one becomes an outright emergency, as they have done time and again for 30 years. Whichever view proves correct, the relevant point for Americans is a convergence of trends that make operations here more attractive and feasible, just as the cost and friction of operating in China are increasing.

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: David Høgsholt

Six Magazine Nº3 by Max Vadukul, 1989
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She’s Got Some Big Ideas

[ed. If Duck Soup had a soul mate, Ms Popova's site Brain Pickings would be it. We seem to share the same philosophy. Now, if we just shared the same traffic and revenues...]

She is the mastermind of the one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown. She is the champion of old-fashioned ideas, yet she is only 28 years old. She is a fierce defender of books, yet she insists she will never write one herself.

At precisely 9:30 on a chilly Saturday morning, Maria Popova slips out of her apartment in Brooklyn, scurries down a few stairs and enters a small basement gym. A former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria, Ms. Popova is the unlikely founder of the exploding online emporium of ideas known as Brain Pickings.

Her exhaustively assembled grab bag of scientific curiosities, forgotten photographs, snippets of old love letters and mash notes to creativity — imagine the high-mindedness of a TED talk mixed with the pop sensibility of P. T. Barnum — spans a blog (500,000 visitors a month), a newsletter (150,000 subscribers) and a Twitter feed (263,000 followers). Her output, which she calls a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness,” has attracted an eclectic group of devotees including the novelist William Gibson, the singer Josh Groban, the comedian Drew Carey, the neuroscientist David Eagleman, the actress Mia Farrow and the Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

“She’s a celebrator,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official. “You feel the tremendous amount of pleasure she takes in finding these things and sharing them. It’s like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour.”  (...)

Unlike most blogger celebrities, however, Ms. Popova revels in remaining anonymous, which means her followers know almost nothing about her. In an age when many tweet what they put in their morning coffee, she rarely uses the word “I.” Her personal history is almost completely absent. Her photograph is not on the site. “I don’t feel the necessity to be in the public eye that way,” she said after reluctantly agreeing to sit for an interview. “There’s a certain safety in making people feel like you’re an organization and not a person. ”

So what exactly is it that she does? Ms. Popova says she views her job as “helping people become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in, until they are.” One entry might discuss how to find your true passion, with links to a talk by Alain de Botton, a book by the cartoonist Hugh MacLeod and a commencement address by Steve Jobs; another, how she asked an artist friend to illustrate thoughts on love from Susan Sontag’s diaries. Recently she recounted an aging Helen Keller’s visit to Martha Graham’s studio.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a friend of Ms. Popova’s, said a good curator was someone whose own taste had somehow become the taste of millions. “What Maria has is the DNA of millions of people,” Ms. Antonelli said. “She somehow tunes in to what would make other people dream, or inspire them in a way that is quite unique.”

by Bruce Feiler, NY Times |  Read more:

Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times