[ed. repost]
Friday, March 1, 2013
The Google Glass Featue No One is Talking About
Google Glass might change your life, but not in the way you think. There’s something else Google Glass makes possible that no one – no one – has talked about yet, and so today I’m writing this blog post to describe it.
To read the raving accounts of tech journalists who Google commissioned for demos, you’d think Glass was something between a jetpack and a magic wand: something so cool, so sleek, so irresistible that it must inevitably replace that fading, pitifully out-of-date device called the smartphone.Sergey Brin himself said as much yesterday, observing that it is “emasculating” to use a smartphone, “rubbing this featureless piece of glass.” His solution to that piece of glass, of course, is called Glass. And his solution to that emasculation is – well, as VentureBeat put it, “Sergey Brin calls smartphones ‘emasculating’ – but dorky Google Glass [is] A-OK.”
Like every other shiny innovation these days, Google Glass will live or die solely on the experience it creates for people. The immediate, most visible problem in the Glass experience is how dorky the user looks while wearing it. No one wants to be the only person in the bar dressed like a cyborg from a 1992 virtual-reality movie. It’s embarrassing. Early adopters will abandon Google Glass if they don’t sense the social approval they seek while wearing it.
Google seems to have calculated this already and recently announced a partnership with Warby Parker, known for its designer glasses favored by the all-important younger demographic. (My own proposal, posted the day before, jokingly suggested that Google look into monocles.)
Except for the awkward physical design, the experience of using Google Glass has won high praise from reviewers. Seeing your bitstreams floating in the air in front of you, it would seem, is an ecstatic experience. Weather! Directions! Social network requests! Email overload! All floating in front of you, never out of your sight! For people who delight in a deluge of digital distractions, this is much more exciting than a smartphone, which forces you back to the boring offline world, every so often, when you put the phone away. Glass promises never to do that. In fact, in a feat of considerable chutzpah, Google is attempting to pitch Glass as an antidote to distraction, since users don’t have to look down at a phone. Right, because now the distractions are all conveniently placed directly into your eyeball! (For a more accurate exploration of Glass-enabled distraction, see this darkly comic parody video. Even edgier is this parody – warning, some spicy language.)
As if all that wasn’t enough, Google Glass comes with yet another, even more important feature: lifebits, the ability to record video of the people, places, and events around you, at all times. Veteran readers will remember that I predicted this six years ago in my book Bit Literacy. From Chapter 13:
The life bitstream will raise new and important issues. Should it be socially acceptable, for example, to record a private conversation with a friend? How will anyone be sure they’re not being recorded, in public or private? … Corporations, police, even friends with ‘life recorders’ will capture the actions and utterances of everyone in sight, whether they like it or not.Today, finally, that future has arrived: a major company offering the ability to record your life, store it, and share it – all with a simple voice command.
And this is where our story takes a turn, toward a ramification that dwarfs every other issue raised so far on Google Glass. Yes, the glasses look dorky – Google will fix that. And sure, Glass forces users to be permanently plugged-in to Google’s digital world – that’s hardly a concern for the company or, for that matter, most users out there. No. The real issue raised by Google Glass, which will either cause the project to fail or create certain outcomes you may not want (which I’ll describe), has to do with the lifebits. Once again, it’s an issue of experience.
by Mark Hurst, Creative Good | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg via: Bizjournal
First Direct Brain-to-Brain Interface Between Two Animals
They even brain-linked two animals thousands of miles apart — one in Durham, North Carolina and one in Natal, Brazil.
The researchers think linking multiple brains could form the first “organic computer.”
“Our previous studies with brain-machine interfaces had convinced us that the brain was much more plastic than we had thought,” said Duke University Medical Center neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis .
“In those experiments, the brain was able to adapt easily to accept input from devices outside the body and even learn how to process invisible infrared light generated by an artificial sensor.
“So, the question we asked was: if the brain could assimilate signals from artificial sensors, could it also assimilate information input from sensors from a different body?”
To find out, the researchers first trained pairs of rats to solve a simple problem — to press the correct lever when an indicator light above the lever switched on, to obtain a sip of water. They next connected the two animals’ brains via arrays of microelectrodes inserted into the area of the cortex that processes touch information.
by Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence | Read more:
Image: Duke University
Strapped: My Eight Years With a Gun
I also hate and fear guns. The .22 in my pocket had one purpose: to take a life. That reality was never far from my mind, and the thought that I might have to kill an attacker—or that an attacker might somehow take the gun away and use it to kill me—was deeply sobering. Then and now, it seemed almost absurd that it had taken me several months of study, practice, and testing before the State of Kentucky saw fit to give me a driver’s license, yet it had taken all of 30 minutes to pick out, purchase, and take possession of the gun I now carried in my pocket. A gun is as destructive in its own way as any automobile.
While organizations such as the National Rifle Association may see themselves as protectors of the Second Amendment, what America’s gun culture has cost in wasted human life is impossible to deny, even putting aside the horrors of events like the Sandy Hook shootings. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2008, 31,593 Americans were killed with a firearm, including 12,179 people who were murdered and 18,223 people who used a gun to commit suicide. The figures include 2,037 children and teens murdered with a gun, and 748 kids who used guns to kill themselves. In ten states—Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and Washington—you are now more likely to die from a gunshot wound than in an automobile accident, according to figures from the Violence Policy Center, an advocacy group.
And while gun rights organizations are quick to trumpet anecdotal stories of gun owners who’ve successfully used a handgun to defend themselves or stop a crime, those numbers pale alongside the number of gun deaths. According to the FBI, between 2005 and 2009, only 975 deaths caused by civilians using firearms were justifiable homicides—killings in response to the commission of a felony. (...)
I discovered that in many ways life with a gun was more stressful than without. I quit reading on the subway, instead paying rapt attention to the other people in the car, looking to see who got on and off the train, and re-evaluating the threat level after every stop. There was also the ever-present fear that, in a moment of carelessness, the bulge of the revolver might be visible through a jacket pocket, or through the rear pouch of the small grey camera bag I used to carry it when the weather got warm.
The more I carried the RG, the more I also realized how little it afforded in terms of real protection. Carrying a handgun in your jacket pocket or your waistband on the streets of New York City is vastly different from keeping one for target shooting. Only the former poses the question: “Can you kill?”
This isn’t simply a question of whether you’re capable of taking a life and living with the ugly consequences. It’s a question of how well you understand the other implications, the hidden subtleties, inherent in the decision to carry a handgun. Can you read a situation quickly and accurately enough to gauge whether your life is truly in danger and whether drawing it is justified? Can you keep an assailant from taking your gun away and using it against you? Are you prepared to go about your everyday life unable to relax, scanning every face you see in the street or, in my case, in the subway, for any sign of danger?
The gun in my pocket was a declaration that the city had broken the social contract.
All police cadets are trained in the use of deadly force, especially how and when it can be avoided. The training often involves role-playing: other cops (or hired actors) play out scenes an officer will likely encounter in the line of duty, such as a violent family dispute or a car stop. A key purpose of these exercises is to convey to a trainee how complex and chaotic these situations usually are, and how vastly different from what he may be expecting. A drunken husband may be beating his wife, also drunk. As the officers pin the husband to the floor and try to handcuff him, the wife might try to grab a gun from a cop’s holster and draw down, screaming at the officers to leave her man alone.
In my personal experience, violent crime had come quickly and unexpectedly. Someone stuck his foot in an elevator door and began asking for directions; a few seconds later, a confederate stepped up behind him and pulled a revolver out of a shopping bag. Someone suddenly grabbed me from behind and pinned my arms while another man stepped in front of me and punched me in the face. There was always a moment of hesitation on my part before reality sank in, hesitation that gave my attackers control of the situation. I constantly asked myself whether having a gun on those occasions would have made a difference, whether I would have been able, both physically and psychologically, to draw the weapon and use it before events spun completely out of my control. I tried very hard to believe the answer was yes. The truth was there was no way to know.
by Hal Stucker, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: photobunny
Too Big to Fail, but Not Too Big to Subsidize?
Elizabeth Warren has only been in the Senate a short amount of time, but she’s already ruffling feathers. Warren asks the questions that most in DC won’t ask. It’s not polite dinner conversation to ask the political class why the banks are getting a free ride.
Warren’s exchange with Bernanke is really something to see.
The key exchange about too-big-to-fail is at the end of the clip, when Warren brings up the taxpayer financing of Wall Street’s insurance.
Bloomberg did an excellent analysis of the taxpayer financing last week, and concluded that the bank profits that look so large really aren’t there. The bank “profits” match the amount of money that taxpayers fork out for the insurance policies that the banks need in case of trouble. In other words, the banks’ “profit” is pretty much taxpayer funded. As Bloomberg notes:
“The profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.”The amount of “profit” and taxpayer money is about $83 billion per year, which is a stunning amount. As Warren says, if anyone else needs insurance, they pay for it — so why should the banks be subsidized for their insurance costs?
Chris in Paris, Americablog | Read more:
It’s the Sugar, Folks
Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it’s fast becoming clear that it’s the major one.
A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.
In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.
The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”
The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).
Allow me to summarize a couple of things that the PLoS One study clarifies. Perhaps most important, as a number of scientists have been insisting in recent years, all calories are not created equal. By definition, all calories give off the same amount of energy when burned, but your body treats sugar calories differently, and that difference is damaging.
And as Lustig lucidly wrote in “Fat Chance,” his compelling 2012 book that looked at the causes of our diet-induced health crisis, it’s become clear that obesity itself is not the cause of our dramatic upswing in chronic disease. Rather, it’s metabolic syndrome, which can strike those of “normal” weight as well as those who are obese. Metabolic syndrome is a result of insulin resistance, which appears to be a direct result of consumption of added sugars. This explains why there’s little argument from scientific quarters about the “obesity won’t kill you” studies; technically, they’re correct, because obesity is a marker for metabolic syndrome, not a cause.
A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.
The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”
The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).
Allow me to summarize a couple of things that the PLoS One study clarifies. Perhaps most important, as a number of scientists have been insisting in recent years, all calories are not created equal. By definition, all calories give off the same amount of energy when burned, but your body treats sugar calories differently, and that difference is damaging.
And as Lustig lucidly wrote in “Fat Chance,” his compelling 2012 book that looked at the causes of our diet-induced health crisis, it’s become clear that obesity itself is not the cause of our dramatic upswing in chronic disease. Rather, it’s metabolic syndrome, which can strike those of “normal” weight as well as those who are obese. Metabolic syndrome is a result of insulin resistance, which appears to be a direct result of consumption of added sugars. This explains why there’s little argument from scientific quarters about the “obesity won’t kill you” studies; technically, they’re correct, because obesity is a marker for metabolic syndrome, not a cause.
Groupon Dismisses Chief After a Dismal Quarter
[ed. Groupon CEO's fairwell letter to employees: irreverant and classy. Andrew Mason was dismissed yesterday.]
(This is for Groupon employees, but I'm posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)
People of Groupon,
After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that's hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.
You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I'm getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we've shared over the last few months, and I've never seen you working together more effectively as a global company - it's time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.
For those who are concerned about me, please don't be - I love Groupon, and I'm terribly proud of what we've created. I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I'll now take some time to decompress (FYI I'm looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I'll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.
If there's one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what's best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness - don't waste the opportunity!
I will miss you terribly.
Love,
Andrew
via:
Image: Johannes Simon/Getty Images for the NY Times
(This is for Groupon employees, but I'm posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)
People of Groupon,After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that's hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.
You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I'm getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we've shared over the last few months, and I've never seen you working together more effectively as a global company - it's time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.
For those who are concerned about me, please don't be - I love Groupon, and I'm terribly proud of what we've created. I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I'll now take some time to decompress (FYI I'm looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I'll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.
If there's one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what's best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness - don't waste the opportunity!
I will miss you terribly.
Love,
Andrew
Image: Johannes Simon/Getty Images for the NY Times
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Rescuing Cesar
Millan paid $1.3 million for this land, which is just over the hill from Magic Mountain, and called it "my greatest investment, after dog food." He planned to turn the place into a sanctuary for abandoned dogs, as well as an academy where he'll teach the unconventional training methods he introduced on nine seasons of his hugely successful TV series, 'Dog Whisperer'. "In reality," he said, "it's not about training dogs. It's about training the human to learn from dogs."
So far, not much progress had been made. The only permanent structures were a small office with a wooden desk and some plastic furniture, plus a few dog kennels and a murky above-ground pool. Millan had hoped to rescue 60 dogs that summer – "hardcore, aggressive dogs," he told me. "Dogs on death row." But, he admitted, "I'm not ready."
Earlier that year, in a few awful months at the start of 2010, Millan's life turned upside down. In February, his sidekick Daddy, a giant, gentle red pit bull who frequently assisted Millan on the show and whom he calls "my mentor," died of cancer at age 16. A month later, while he was on tour in Europe, his wife of 16 years, Ilusion, informed him she was filing for divorce. As he was reeling from those blows, Millan discovered that while 'Dog Whisperer' had made him one of America's biggest TV stars, a series of bad business deals had left him with very little in the bank to show for it. "I found out I didn't own anything – just T-shirts and touring," he told me recently. "It was the biggest shock in the world."
Millan remembers walking around in a daze, feeling betrayed and very alone. "I am a pack animal," he said. "Everything I did was to keep the pack together. All of a sudden I had no pack." He slept on his brother's couch, spent time in church, and lost so much weight he dropped four pants sizes. Occasionally, he returned home to visit his family in suburban Santa Clarita, a few miles from the ranch. "We were trying to do the whole thing white people do where they come back and visit," he says now, with a bitter laugh. "But it didn't work for me." Millan's two sons, Andre, then 15, and Calvin, 11, blamed him for the separation and refused to speak to him. "They were brainwashed. . . . They believed their life was better without me," he says. During the worst times, even his dogs kept their distance. "Dogs don't follow an unstable leader," he says. "I was very unstable."
That May, in 2010, Millan hit bottom. "It was a spiral," he says. "All the willpower I had, the desire to motivate myself, my kids, all I had achieved - none of that, nothing, mattered."
One day, at his wife's house, he swallowed a bottle of her Xanax and some other pills and got into bed, hoping to end his life. "I thought, If I do a combination, I can die quicker. So I just took all the pills I could find, poof"
"I had so much rage and sadness," he continues. "I went to the other side of me, which is 'fuck it, I'm a failure.'" Millan woke up in the hospital psychiatric ward, where he remained under observation for 72 hours. "Nothing happened!" he says. "I thought, Well shit, that means I'm not supposed to die. I better get back to work."
I visited Millan at the ranch a few months after his suicide attempt. When I arrived he was lying on a bench in the shade, sweating through a purple polo shirt, with a bottle of Maalox resting on his chest. "I'm still managing the depression, the anger, the insecurity," he told me, "but I am moving forward." A pair of hyperactive huskies belonging to his close friend Jada Pinkett Smith ran through the hills pulling a sled Millan had modified for the rocky terrain. Junior, a sleek, gray three-year-old pit bull he was grooming to take Daddy's place, lay quietly under the bench, watching Millan's every move. "I couldn't have done what I do without Daddy," he said, "and now I can't do it without Junior. There's always a pit bull there supporting me."
Millan is a short, stocky guy – "like a burrito," he says – but he carries himself with a straight back, chest jutted out, a natural alpha. When he arrived in the United States 22 years ago, he knew only a single English word - "OK" - and he still talks in a loose, colloquial SoCal Spanglish, rolling through sentences with mixed-up tenses, calling his dog Blizzard a "Jello Lab," pronouncing buffet with a hard t and sushi as "su-chi." On 'Dog Whisperer,' Millan uses the language deficit to his advantage, putting clients at ease with his always polite, effortlessly funny broken-English banter as he (often painfully) dissects their troubled relationships with their dogs. In person he's just as charming – open, inquisitive, with a quick mind and a slightly rough edge that makes him even more likable. For all his alpha-male poise, Millan also possesses humility, which he says comes with the job. "In my field, working with animals, they detest egotistical people," he says. "Dogs are wise. They don't buy BS. . . . When you are egotistical, you're not grounded. So it's not even an option for me to become disconnected or lose my grounding."
All that summer, Millan spent his days at the ranch, clearing brush, digging roads, and planting trees. "Some people turn to cigarettes and alcohol when they have problems," he said. "I use hard work." When the sadness overwhelmed him, he would hike up the nearly vertical rim of the canyon – rocky, dry scrub thick with rattlesnakes – in heat that reached 115 degrees. If he didn't feel better when he got back down, he'd do it again.
One night, "I was sitting under this tree, right here," he said, pulling up in the Gator next to a giant Buddha statue, "and I was crying. I noticed the dogs started coming over, and they surrounded me. There were, like, 11 dogs all around, and they started to lick my face. Normally I don't like to be licked. I'm afraid of germs, but this was different. I had the sense that these dogs were healing me. From that night, I began to get stronger."
by Jason Fine, Men's Journal | Read more:
Photo via FanPop
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