Pics and It Didn’t Happen

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
—Susan Sontag, from On Photography (1973)

A photograph is made of time as much as it is of light — a frozen shutter-speed-size gap of the present captured within a photo border. Despite this, photographs have always been a way to cheat death, or at least to declare the illusion of immortality through lasting visual evidence. There’s always the possibility that the next photo you take will one day be lovingly removed from a box by some unborn great-grandchild; the Polaroid developing in your hands might come to be pinned to someone’s bedpost in posterity. To update that to more contemporary terms, your selfie on Instagram might be a signpost for the future you of what it was like to be this young.

On Snapchat, images have no such future. Fittingly, its logo is a ghost.

By refuting the assumption of the permanence of the image, Snapchat is a radical departure. It inaugurates temporary photography, in which photos are seen once by their chosen audience and then are gone in 10 seconds or less. Snapchat recipients can take a screenshot, though the app discourages this by notifying the sender. Millions of people have done this a billion times with the Snapchat app (to say nothing of Facebook’s copycat, Poke).

The temporary photograph’s abbreviated lifespan changes how it is made and seen, and what it comes to mean. Snaps could be likened to other temporary art such as ice sculptures or decay art (e.g., Yoko Ono’s famous rotting apple) that takes seriously the process of disappearance, or the One Hour Photo project from 2010 that has as its premise to “project a photograph for one hour, then ensure that it will never be seen again.” There was once a Temporary Art Museum in Washington, D.C.However, whatever changes in the aesthetics of photographic vision Snapchat is effecting are difficult to assess, given that no one really knows what its self-deleting photos collectively look like. In many ways, this is exactly the point.

To understand the emergence of temporary photography, one must understand it in relation to the inflating archive of persistent images and their significance on how we perceive and remember the world.  (...)

Let’s face it, much of photography was already becoming Snapchat even before Snapchat existed. While much is justifiably, if hyperbolically. Here’s why I think those claims are problematically hyperbolic, made of “the death of privacy” in the age of information immortality, the likely fate of the vast majority of images today is to be briefly consumed and quickly forgotten. As well as offering relief from deepening documentary vision, the temporary photograph also responds to this photographic abundance, which has deflated the value of images. As making more and more photos becomes easier, each individual shot means less and less. Snapchat is an attempt at re-inflation.

by Nathan Jurgenson, New Inquiry |  Read more:
Image: Susan Sontag

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Automatic Nipple Detection Using Shape and Statistical Skin Color Information

Abstract. This paper presents a new approach on nipple detection for adult content recognition, it combines the advantage of Adaboost algorithm that is rapid speed in object detection and the robustness of nipple features for adaptive nipple detection. This method first locates the potential nipple-like region by using Adaboost algorithm for fast processing speed. It is followed by a nipple detection using the information of shape and skin color relation between nipple and non-nipple region. As this method uses the nipple features to conduct the adult image detection, it can achieve more precise detection and avoids other methods that only detect the percentage of exposure skin area to decide whether it is an adult image. The proposed method can be also used for other organ level detection. The experiments show that our method performs well for nipple detection in adult images.

1 Introduction 

There are a huge number of adult images that can be freely accessed in multimedia documents and databases through Internet. To protect children, detection and blocking the obscene images and videos received more and more concern. Automatic recognition of pornographic images has been studied by some researchers. Current methods can be briefly classified into two kinds [1]: (1) Skin-based detection and (2) Feature-based detection.

Skin-based methods focus on skin detection. Many skin models have been developed based on color histogram [1], chromatic distribution [2], color and texture information [3][5][6][8][9]. After skin region has been detected, perform one of below detections: (a) Model-based detection [3] which is using a geometrical model to describe the structure or shape of human body; (b) Region-based detection which extracts features for recognition based on the detected skin regions. These features include contour and contour-based features [1][8], shape features [2][6], a series of features [9] from each connected skin region: color, texture, and shape, etc. Featurebased methods focus on using the features directly extracted in the images. These features include normalized central moments and color histogram [4], shape feature (Compactness descriptor) [7], etc. These methods tend to use a global matching rather than a local matching. All existing methods mentioned above suffer from a fundamental problem that they did not conduct the detection at the organ (object) level. A certain percentage of skin detected over the whole image or a human body does not mean it is a naked adult image. To make a correct judgment, the basic rule is checking whether the female nipples, male and female private parts are exposure into the image. The only paper can be found in literature that detects the sex organ is in [10] for nipple detection. This method conducted the skin detection first, and then performed the nipple detection using self-organizing map neural network. They claimed thatthe correct nipple detection rate is 65.4%.

This paper focuses on nipple detection in images. It is a fundament step in pornography image detection. Our method is an organ model driven, that means we emphasize the features of organ to be detected. In nipple detection, shape and skin are the most important features for nipple appearance. Therefore, in the real application, both of them should be combined for detection, at least play the same important role. Our method consists of two stages:

 
(1) Rapid locating for potential nipple region. Adaboost algorithm with Haar-like
features is used to rapidly locate the possible nipple regions.

(2) Nipple detection which combines shape and skin statistical information is applied to determine whether the located regions from stage 1 are the real nipples.

The remaining structure of this paper is arranged as follows. Section 2 briefly introduces the Adaboost algorithm with Haar-like features and its application in searching the possible nipple region. Section 3 describes the details of the nipple model for nipple detection. Experimental results and discussion are presented in Section 4. Finally, the conclusion of this paper is presented in Section 5.

by Yue Wang, Jun Li, HeeLin Wang, and ZuJun Hou, Institute for Infocomm Research |  Read more (pdf):
Image via: Institute for Infocomm Research

Stranger Visions

The next time you comb your hair in a public restroom or aimlessly pick a stray strand off your coat while waiting for the subway, take a moment to think about the personal information you’re leaving behind. If you’ve seen enough crime shows on television, you know that hair follicles contain unique DNA sequences, from which a crafty scientist (or, increasingly, a savvy hobbyist) can glean all kinds of personal information about you. And while leaving your locks all over town isn’t necessarily as bad as, say, walking around with your Social Security number tattooed to your forehead, imagine what someone could do with that info.

In the case of artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her Stranger Visions project, she’s picking up stray hairs, cigarette butts, chewing gum and finger nails in public places like bus stops, restrooms, restaurants, and wherever else people might inadvertently leave traces of themselves behind, and using these samples to sequence and analyze theDNA contained within. She then uses this information to construct speculative portraits of what these anonymous shedders might look like based on their genetic profile. The project is currently on view at the Eyebeam Annual Showcase (through January 26th) and is part of an open studio presentation at The Clocktower Gallery on January 24th.

Dewey-Hagborg first conceived of the idea, which explores the dystopian future of genetic surveillance, while contemplating a stray hair caught in a crack in the wall at her therapist’s office. “I began thinking to myself, ’I wonder who would lay down on that couch when they go to therapy. The more I thought about it, the more curious I became about who this person could possibly be. As I just mulled it over, I started thinking about how I could figure out more about that person and, you know, kind of connecting that with all of the forensic shows you see on TV. The idea kind of stuck in my head.”

Though she didn’t have a background in biology or genetic research, she put together a proposal and started shopping it around to various residency and grant programs. She finally ended up as a 2012 resident at Eyebeam, where she began developing her ideas in earnest after taking several introductory crash courses in genomics that taught her the basics of analyzing sequenced DNA.

Using facial recognition algorithms she had worked with in the past, Dewey-Hagborg started collaborating with biologists at Genspace, a community biolab in downtown Brooklyn, and began building a 3D modeling software that would reconstruct the hypothetical visages of her mystery strangers. By identifying known parts of the genetic code that are associated with specific physical traits, then using a 3D facial modeling software developed by some researchers in Basel, Dewey-Hagborg was able to construct portraits of people based on their DNA.

by Julia Kaganskiy, The Creators Project |  Read more:

Image: Heather Dewey-Hagborg

When Will the Internet Reach Its Limit (and How Do We Stop That from Happening)?

The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year. Perhaps more significantly, the faster and more powerful mobile devices hitting the market annually are producing and consuming content at unprecedented levels. Global mobile data grew 70 percent in 2012, according to a recent report from Cisco, which makes a lot of the gear that runs the Internet. Yet the capacity of the world’s networking infrastructure is finite, leaving many to wonder when we will hit the upper limit, and what to do when that happens.

There are ways to boost capacity of course, such as adding cables, packing those cables with more data-carrying optical fibers and off-loading traffic onto smaller satellite networks, but these steps simply delay the inevitable. The solution is to make the infrastructure smarter. Two main components would be needed: computers and other devices that can filter their content before tossing it onto the network, along with a network that better understands what to do with this content, rather than numbly perceiving it as an endless, undifferentiated stream of bits and bytes.

To find out how these major advances could be accomplished, Scientific Americanrecently spoke with Markus Hofmann, head of Bell Labs Research in New Jersey, the research and development arm of Alcatel–Lucent that, in its various guises, is credited with developing the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device and a litany of other groundbreaking 20th-century technologies. Hofmann and his team see “information networking” as the way forward, an approach that promises to extend the Internet’s capacity by raising its IQ.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How do we know we are approaching the limits of our current telecom infrastructure?
The signs are subtle, but they are there. A personal example—When I use Skype to send my parents in Germany live video of my kids playing hockey, the video sometimes freezes at the most exciting moments. In all, this doesn’t happen too often, but it happens more frequently lately—a sign that networks are becoming stressed by the amount of data they’re asked to carry.

We know there are certain limits that Mother Nature gives us—only so much information you can transmit over certain communications channels. That phenomenon is called the nonlinear Shannon limit [named after former Bell Telephone Laboratories mathematician Claude Shannon], and it tells us how far we can push with today’s technologies. We are already very, very close to this limit, within a factor of two roughly. Put another way, based on our experiments in the lab, when we double the amount of network traffic we have today—something that could happen within the next four or five years—we will exceed the Shannon limit. That tells us there’s a fundamental roadblock here. There is no way we can stretch this limit, just as we cannot increase the speed of light. So we need to work with these limits and still find ways to continue the needed growth.

How do you keep the Internet from reaching “the limit”?
The most obvious way is to increase bandwidth by laying more fiber. Instead of having just one transatlantic fiber-optic cable, for example, you have two or five or 10. That’s the brute-force approach, but it’s very expensive—you need to dig up the ground and lay the fiber, you need multiple optical amplifiers, integrated transmitters and receivers, and so on. An alternative is to explore another dimension: spatial division multiplexing, which is all about integration. Put simply, you transmit multiple channels within a single cable. Still, boosting the existing infrastructure alone won’t be sufficient to meet growing communications needs. What’s needed is a network that no longer looks at raw data as only bits and bytes but rather as pieces of information relevant to a person using a computer or smartphone. On a given day do you want to know the temperature, wind speed and air pressure or do you simply want to know how you should dress? This is referred to as information networking.

by Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American | Read more:

Image: Bell Labs

Karl Brullov, The Last Day of Pompeii (detail)
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700 Years in Heaven

In school they tell you time is an illusion, but the profs over-complicate it if you ask me. There’s no such thing as before and after, just a big mash of now. “Time” is something our brains make up to help us get from point A to point B. Like the long path up to Stacy Adams’ house. Someone put it there so you wouldn’t walk around the woods in circles, not getting anywhere. Soon as scientists figured that out, they knew you could make time your bitch. You can stretch it and squash it and reshape it. You just need the right drugs and hardware.

Someday we’ll tell our kids about the night we saw our first Quantum Condenser, that’s what my Lou says on the path up to Stacy Adams’ house. Lou’s into the steevy new gear. I tend to wait for the third or fourth gen when shit actually gets good. But I have to admit I’m excited to see a real life QC. Stacy’s family was the first in the boro to get one. Her dad works at Bubble Labs, where they invented the thing.

You think she’ll let us use it? Lou asks.

I shrug. Then I tickle him because he’s obviously so excited. He shoves me away and then pulls me in and we go arms-around-waists, bumping against each other up the path. Me and my Lou.

Up the hill we go Hi Ho, up to Stacy’s big glass house at the top of the town like Mount Olympus (we just did that mod in Ancient History), and when we ring the bell Stacy’s there in her green double-breasted party suit.

Boys, she goes. Party’s in the back. Come on in.

She takes our wraps and leads us down to what I guess you’d call the basement, though it’s got windows on three sides and an amazing view of the town. The party’s pretty steeze. Mostly kids from school. Good music. Everywhere you look there’s the Bubble Labs logo. The girl’s family basically gets every new piece of tech for free.

I get a drink and say hey to a few people and then I wind back to Stacy, who’s easy to find in her green suit.

So how’s it work? I ask.

How’s what work.

You know. The QC.

She smiles because of course she knows what everyone wants to try.

You ever done it? I ask.

Yes.

I take a sip from my drink. And it’s safe?

I’m here, aren’t I?

What’s it like?

She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the party, or maybe out the window on the far side of the room. She’s kind of smiling at herself but it’s like her brain’s gone for a little walk without me.

by John M. Cusick, yarn | Read more:

Illustration: discopalace (flickr.com)

John Coltrane, Miles Davis

The Shooter

The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.

It was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.

He stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced. I didn't know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy.

We would end up intimately familiar with each other's lives. We'd have dinners, lots of Scotch. He's played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife.

In my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter's office. "He asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a sniper.

"He said, 'Hey, we have snipers.'

"I said, 'Seriously, dude. You do not have snipers in the Navy.' But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. I signed up on a whim."

"That's the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated," he joked, "because she broke my fucking heart."

I would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions, his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night.

by Phil Bronstein, CIR |  Read more:

Photo: The Shooter

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A Match Made in the Code

Unlike many other Web dating services, eHarmony doesn’t let customers search for partners on their own. They pay up to $60 per month to be offered matches based on their answers to a long questionnaire, which currently has about 200 items. The company has gathered answers from 44 million people, and says that its matches have led to more than half a million marriages since 2005.

Dr. Gonzaga, a social psychologist who previously worked at a marriage-research lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, said eHarmony wouldn’t let him disclose its formulas, but he did offer some revelations. He said its newest algorithm matches couples by focusing on six factors:

¶ Level of agreeableness — or, put another way, how quarrelsome a person is.

¶ Preference for closeness with a partner — how much emotional intimacy each wants and how much time each likes to spend with a partner.

¶ Degree of sexual and romantic passion.

¶ Level of extroversion and openness to new experience.

¶ How important spirituality is.

¶ How optimistic and happy each one is.

The more similarly that two people score in these factors, the better their chances, Dr. Gonzaga said, and presented evidence, not yet published, from several studies at eHarmony Labs. One study, which tracked more than 400 married couples matched by eHarmony, found that scores from their initial questionnaires correlated with a couple’s satisfaction with their relationship four years later.

“It is possible,” Dr. Gonzaga concluded, “to empirically derive a matchmaking algorithm that predicts the relationship of a couple before they ever meet.”

Not so fast, replied the critics in the hall. They didn’t doubt that factors like agreeableness could predict a good marriage. But that didn’t mean eHarmony had found the secret to matchmaking, said Harry T. Reis of the University of Rochester, one of the authors of last year’s critique.

“That agreeable person that you happen to be matching up with me would, in fact, get along famously with anyone in this room,” Dr. Reis told Dr. Gonzaga.

He and his co-authors argued that eHarmony’s results could merely reflect the well-known “person effect”: an agreeable, non-neurotic, optimistic person will tend to fare better in any relationship. But the research demonstrating this effect also showed that it’s hard to make predictions based on what’s called a dyadic effect — how similar the partners are to each other.

“In the existing literature, similarity components are notoriously weak at accounting for relationship satisfaction,” said Paul W. Eastwick of the University of Texas, Austin. “For example, what really matters for my relationship satisfaction is whether I myself am neurotic and, to a slightly lesser extent, whether my partner is neurotic. Our similarity on neuroticism is irrelevant.”

by John Tierney, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Viktor Koen

Resigning Pope No Longer Has Strength To Lead Church Backward

VATICAN CITY—Citing his advancing age and deteriorating health, Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation from the papacy Monday, saying he no longer possessed the strength and energy required to lead the Catholic Church backward.

According to the 85-year-old pontiff, after considerable prayer and reflection on his physical stamina and mental acuity, he concluded that his declining faculties left him unable to helm the Church’s ambitious regressive agenda and guide the faith’s one billion global followers on their steady march away from modernity and cultural advancement.

“It is with sadness, but steadfast conviction, that I announce I am no longer capable of impeding social progress with the energy and endurance that is required of the highest ministry in the Roman Catholic Church,” Benedict reportedly said in Latin to the Vatican’s highest cardinals. “While I’m proud of the strides the Church has made over the past eight years, from thwarting AIDS-prevention efforts in Africa to failing to punish or even admit to decades of sexual abuse of children at the hands of clergy, it has become evident to me that, in this rapidly evolving world, I now lack the capacity to continue guiding this faith back centuries.”

“Thus, I must step down from the papacy,” he added. “But let me assure every member of the Church that the Vatican’s commitment to narrow-mindedness and social obstruction will long live on after my departure.”

by The Onion |  Read more: 

Photo: uncredited

Bear Counting in Canada

[ed. What it's like to weigh and radio tag a denning Momma black bear and her three young cubs in the wilds of northern Ontario, Canada. Great video, and hilarious.]

Armin Carl Hansen (American, 1886 - 1957) Fishermen

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The Fresh Wars

One afternoon last fall in New York, walking toward the subway at Union Square, I decided to lose the tortilla.

For months, Taco Bell had been urging America to drop by for a taste of its Cantina Bell menu. TV commercials featured celebrity spokeschef Lorena Garcia touring dewy fields of cilantro and welcoming viewers into a kitchen where she and her associates lovingly ladled black beans over rice. She laid oblong medallions of grilled chicken atop beds of romaine lettuce, roasted corn, and vermilion slivers of pepper and tomato. "Making a burrito bowl, I think, made Taco Bell a little bit nervous—mostly because they're used to wrapping everything in a tortilla," Garcia explains in one spot. "But I said, 'Guys, lose the tortilla and share these beautiful ingredients with the world.’ "

"Beautiful ingredients" aren't the first things one associates with Taco Bell, a chain that last year enjoyed record-shattering success with its Doritos Locos Taco, a $1.29 fistful of garbage dusted in neon-orange sodium that tasted vaguely like cheese and synergy. They certainly weren't the first things I saw when I sat down with my Cantina Bowl, from which pale green guacamole and a lumpy tuft of grated Monterey Jack stared back at me from a valley of rice, romaine, and meat as if to croak, "Ta-daaaahhh."

Yet despite its unremarkable appearance, the Cantina Bowl was remarkable for what it signified. It was a shot across the bow to competitors like Chipotle, a company that had based nearly two decades of rapid growth on wholesome, sustainably raised ingredients prepared in-store before Taco Bell ever enlisted Chef Garcia for an offensive of its own.

In essence, it was the latest salvo in the Fresh Wars.

The Fresh Wars have advertisers, marketers, and chefs embroiled in a battle for the title of freshest American fast food—and for the business of an increasingly sophisticated and conscientious populace of eaters. Taco Bell vs. Chipotle is just the start. The tagline "Eat Fresh" has helped Subway eclipse McDonald's as the world's largest fast-food chain. But Arby's crusade to "Slice Up the Truth About Freshness" aims to sow doubts about Subway's food sourcing while wooing customers with meat sliced on-premises. Meanwhile, Domino's Pizza has spent more than three years and untold millions reinventing its pizza and its image as models of quality and transparency, a gambit that has at least two high-profile competitors following suit.

The skirmishes emphasize the extraordinary value of one abstract concept for an industry desperate to capitalize on health and sourcing trends without actually having to invest in high-quality ingredients. Fresh doesn't have to be low-calorie or even especially nutritious—a burrito with ingredients prepared on-site at Chipotle may pack three times the calories of a burger. Nor does fresh require pathologically locavorian supply-chain standards: As Arby's has revealed, a sandwich from Subway might contain cold-cuts processed, packaged, and shipped from a centralized facility in Iowa. Better yet for retailers like Taco Bell, Domino's, and Arby's, the mere implications of freshness can be sold at a premium to new customers who otherwise might have avoided those chains' wares altogether. The only unabashedly pure thing about the concept of fresh is its subjectivity.

"I think it's meaningless, almost, now," says Mark Crumpacker, the chief marketing officer with Chipotle. "You could claim that something very heavily processed was fresh, I guess. I don't think there are any rules around 'fresh.' You can just say it with impunity. And I think lots of people do."

So maybe "Is it fresh?" isn't the question we should be asking ourselves as we lose the tortilla, slice up freshness, and muddle through the trenches of fast-food trends. Instead, amid the varying strategies, we have a much more basic and far more crucial determination to make: What does fresh even mean?

by S.T. VanAirsdale, Slate |  Read more:
Photos: BrokenSphere/Wikipedia Commons: iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Francis Picabia Udnie, Jeune fille américaine, Danse, 1913
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Matthias Kanter. Weg, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 220 x 200 cm.

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The Boeing Debacle

Brake problems. A fuel leak. A cracked windshield. One electrical fire. Then another. An emergency landing in Japan. A safety investigation imposed by the FAA. Then two premier customers—Japan’s two main airlines, ANA and JAL, ground their fleet of Boeing [BA] 787s. Then the FAA grounds all 787s used by the only American carrier. Now other regulators around the world follow suit, grounding all 50 of the 787s delivered so far. The regulatory grounding of an entire fleet is unusual—the first since 1979—and relates to a key to the plane’s claimed energy-efficiency: the novel use of lithium ion batteries, which have shown a propensity to overheat and lead to fires—fires that generate oxygen and hence are difficult to put out.

And keep in mind: Boeing’s 787 project is already billions of dollars over budget. The delivery schedule has been pushed back at least seven times. The first planes were delivered over three years late. In fact, out of a total of 848 planes sold, only 6 percent have been delivered.

Yet grave as these issues seem, they are merely symptoms of a deeper disease that has been gnawing at the US economy for decades: flawed offshoring decisions by the C-suite. Offshoring is not some menial matter to be left to accountants in the backroom or high-priced consultants armed with spreadsheets, promising quick profits. It raises mission-critical issues potentially affecting the survival of entire firms, whole industries and ultimately the economy.

Not just Boeing: an economy-wide problem

Thus Boeing is hardly alone in making flawed offshoring decisions. Boeing is just the latest and most spectacular example of an economy-wide problem.

“Many companies that offshored manufacturing didn’t really do the math,” Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer and founder of the Reshoring Initiative told me. As many as 60 percent of the decisions were based on miscalculations.

As noted by Gary Pisano and Willy Shih in their classic article, “Restoring American Competitiveness” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009), offshoring has been devastating whole US industries, stunting innovation, and crippling capacity to compete long-term.

Pisano and Shih write: “The decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.”

Pisano and Shih have a frighteningly long list of industries that are “already lost” to the USA, including: compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs and handheld devices like mobile phones; electrophoretic displays; lithium ion, lithium polymer and NiMH batteries; advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters and power semiconductors for solar panels; desktop, notebook and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard-disk drives; consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes; advanced composite used in sporting goods and other consumer gear; advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.

The list of industries “at risk” is even longer and more worrisome.

by Steve Denning, Forbes |  Read more:

Image: uncredited