The Perils of Perfection

"When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting” is the reassuring slogan greeting visitors at the Web site for LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets, the service would learn “about your likes, tastes, syntax” and add a personal touch to all those automatically composed scribblings from the world beyond.

LivesOn may yet prove to be a parody, or it may fizzle for any number of reasons, but as an idea it highlights the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley today: what could be disrupted should be disrupted — even death.

Barriers and constraints — anything that imposes artificial limits on the human condition — are being destroyed with particular gusto. Superhuman, another mysterious start-up that could enliven any comedy show, promises to offer, as its co-founder recently put it, an unspecified service that “helps people be superhuman.” Well, at least they had the decency not to call it The Übermensch.

Recent debates about Twitter revolutions or the Internet’s impact on cognition have mostly glossed over the fact that Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity. If they have their way, no individual foibles would go unpunished — ideally, technology would even make such foibles obsolete.

Even boredom seems to be in its last throes: designers in Japan have found a way to make our train trips perpetually fun-filled. With the help of an iPhone, a projector, a GPS module and Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, their contrivance allows riders to add new objects to what they see “outside,” thus enlivening the bleak landscape in their train windows. This could be a big hit in North Korea — and not just on trains.

Or, if you tend to forget things, Silicon Valley wants to give you an app to remember everything. If you occasionally prevaricate in order to meet your clashing obligations as a parent, friend or colleague, another app might spot inconsistencies in your behavior and inform your interlocutors if you are telling the truth. If you experience discomfort because you encounter people and things that you do not like, another app or gadget might spare you the pain by rendering them invisible.

Sunny, smooth, clean: with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway.

Last month Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s former marketing director, enthused about a trendy app to “crowdsource absolutely every decision in your life.” Called Seesaw, the app lets you run instant polls of your friends and ask for advice on anything: what wedding dress to buy, what latte drink to order and soon, perhaps, what political candidate to support.

Seesaw offers an interesting twist on how we think about feedback and failure. It used to be that we bought things to impress our friends, fully aware that they might not like our purchases. Now this logic is inverted: if something impresses our friends, we buy it. The risks of rejection have been minimized; we know well in advance how many Facebook “likes” our every decision would accumulate.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley. Whatever their contribution to our maturity as human beings, decisions also bring out pain and, faced with a choice between maturity and pain-minimization, Silicon Valley has chosen the latter — perhaps as a result of yet another instant poll.

The only exception to the pain-minimization rule is when pain — or at least discomfort — must be induced to ensure that we behave honestly and consistently.

by Evgeny Morozov, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Gary Taxal

Population Distribution of USA

via: Visualizing Economics (click link for larger image)

h/t The Big Picture

Gil Scott Heron

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The Replacements

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“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it."
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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Jack Vettriano, The Temptress, 2008. 

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Could This App Treat Depression?

Diego Pizzagalli spent a good chunk of 10 years at Harvard doing what most professors at elite institutions do: research. Specifically, research on depression. He's fMRI'd and EEG'd a lot of gray matter, but most of his work got stuck in the lab and never evolved into any real-world application. Then he developed something that was too good to let collect dust in the hallowed halls of academia: software that he says could help treat depression.

Now with the help of the Baltimore-based startup incubator Canterbury Road Partners, Pizzagalli is set to turn his lab invention into an app. MoodTune will be a series of simple games that when played regularly, can help treat depression, Pizzagalli and his colleagues say. Turn on the app for 15 minutes a day, play through some games, and maybe it could help. Maybe, they say, in some cases, it'd be all a depressed person would need. Could something that simple actually work?

Pizzagalli started working on depression in 1999 and released some of his most important papers in 2001. The papers focused on "biomarkers," signals of response in the brain to antidepressants and psychotherapy. Take a peek inside the brain, and you can see areas light up--or fail to light up--in response to treatments. Whether an area lights up or not predicts, with considerable accuracy, whether a treatment works, he says.

So, the thinking goes, what we if we illuminate those regions another way? The brain could readjust appropriately without the need for a pill. The anterior cingulate cortex is associated with depression and also works when snap decisions need to be made, Pizzagalli says, so perhaps having someone make snap decisions would help treat depression. He developed desktop software in his lab to test it out and was happy enough with the results to delve deeper into the technology.

Software like that could make for a "bottom-up" approach to depression treatment. It could "strengthen the circuitry" of the ruminative brain. It could break the cycle of dwelling seen in so many depressives. It could be the first treatment of its kind to go on the market. But to turn the research into anything tangible took some extracurricular assistance.

by Colin Lecher, PopSci |  Read more:

Photo: Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research

LCD Soundsystem

[ed. repost]

Karen Tusinski On the Side White Poppies
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My Life As A Professional Cannabis Baker

I was pregnant when I left my last office job. I was chief of staff at a nonprofit tech organization, but I became disillusioned with that path, and after my daughter was born, I decided I would never to go back to a corporate environment. A friend of mine was baking edibles — that is, foods infused with marijuana — and had approached me a few times about getting involved.

I was reluctant because I knew that if I was going to do it, I had to go all out. I couldn't hide it from my family, and I didn't want to hide it from my family. I've been around marijuana and smoking for years, but I kept it private. I was going to step out of a closet in a way, and that was something I struggled with for a while. It took a little bit of courage. But my family was very supportive.

As soon as my daughter was old enough that I had a little more time, I started baking with marijuana, alongside my friend. At first, I would bake huge batches, but sometimes my cookies could sit around for weeks before they went anywhere. I knew I could develop a niche for myself by using fresh, quality ingredients (like freshly squeezed organic lemons from my mom's garden). Now I bake everything to order and deliver the goods fresh to a handful of medical marijuana clubs in my neighborhood.

For now, I sell only sweets. I have five cookies and bars: peanut butter oatmeal cookies, snickerdoodle cookies, lemon bars, brownies, and peanut butter brownies. The cakes are red velvet with cream cheese glaze cake, triple chocolate cake, carrot cake, lemon cake, and ginger cake. I just finalized a recipe for a Rice Krispie treat, and people love it, so I'll add that to the menu soon.

I make extractions using both butter and oil, so that I can have flexibility, depending on the recipe. The psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is THC, and that's what's getting into the butter and the oil when I do the extraction. Eating these is different than smoking pot, because the THC gets into your blood stream through your digestive system, which means it takes a little bit longer to hit you. When it does, you get an all-body high and it's very relaxing.

The oil I make takes nearly 24 hours all said and done, and I do it in a Crock-Pot — it's three cycles of heating on low for three hours, and then cooling for nine hours. The butter requires a little more babysitting. I use marijuana trim, which are the plant's small leaves and stems that the dispensaries trim away from the buds. I boil the trim in water first, because butter can't get hot enough on its own. After I add the butter, it's the same heating and cooling process as the oil on the stovetop. When the process is done, I strain out the leaves and let the let the mixture cool, allowing the butter to separate from the water. (...)

I donate my edibles to medical marijuana clubs for a recommended donation price to recoup my cost and be reimbursed for my time. To be a member and buy goods at a club, you need a recommendation from a doctor, which has to be renewed annually. The clubs offer my baked goods to their members for another recommended price, which is often double what they give me for them. My recommended donation is $5 or $6 for a package of three cookies; the members donate $10 or $12 for that same package. Baking edibles has been my only source of income for the last three years, but it took some time to build up the business. I like to barter as much as I can to get the cannabis. I need nearly half a pound of trim to make 6 pounds of butter or 10 cups of oil, and I was spending like $300 a pound for trim. Now I bake marijuana edibles in exchange for the marijuana. So yeah, I bake a lot.

These days, I bake 20 to 30 hours per week, and I can make maybe 15 dozen pastries. At my busiest, I was working 11-hour days. My husband and my mom had to help. Honestly, I'm not sure if I want to get back to that point. I'd like to find a happy medium.

by Emily Fleischaker, Buzz Feed | Read more:

Image by Joshua Ballinger

Coal Is History. Or Is It?

The conventional wisdom is that dirty, polluting coal is the fuel of the past, and that any day now the power plants that burn coal will be phased out and shut down.

Taking the place of coal will be clean-burning natural gas and clean, green solar and wind power.

Glancing at the headlines you might really think that this fantasy was coming to pass.

Why just today the Sierra Club is out with an announcement that its Beyond Coal campaign is halfway to its goal of shutting down a third of U.S. coal plants. Wow!

With 12,000 megawatts of new wind power last year and 30% growth in solar power, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell 3.7% in 2012.

President Obama in his State of the Union address said that he would “direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy” — most likely by continuing to tighten emissions controls, regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and effectively banning any new coal-fired power plants.

Earlier this week the giant power utility AEP announced that, in a settlement with the EPA and several states, it was shuttering three coal-fired plants in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky with 2,000 megawatts of generation capacity. AEP will also be investing $5 billion to install new emissions reduction technology at some of its other coal plants. And to help replace the coal power it will build 200 mw of wind and solar installations. The Sierra Club called it a “major victory.”

The story sounds even better at the TennesseeValley Authority, which in 2012 reduced its coal consumption by 16% to about 30 million tons. It’s in the midst of retiring 2,000 mw of coal capacity by 2017. Last year it completed a new 1,000 mw gas-fired plant in Tennessee to help replace the four coal units retired at the same site. For the first time in memory TVA got less than half of its power from coal.

Thanks to natural gas prices (brought about by the boom in fracking) hitting a low of $1.85 per MMBtu last April, in 2012 generators switched a bunch of their electricity generation from coal to natural gas. Nationwide that switching amounted to an uptick of some 8 billion cubic feet a day of gas consumption, offsetting millions of tons of coal.

As a result, coal’s contribution to nationwide power generation fell to 37% in 2012 down from 49% in 2007. That’s a precipitous drop for an industry that operates on such a massive scale. Natural gas accounts for 30% of power generation fuel.

So we’re on our way to getting rid of coal, right?

Not at all.

by Christopher Helman, Forbes |  Read more:

Photo: Wikipedia

Massive Attack

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The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case

[ed. See also: Bradley Manning: the face of heroism]

After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?

The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma'am.”

The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating. The judge will apparently allow my testimony, so if the prosecution decides to pursue the more serious charges to which Manning did not plead guilty, I will explain at trial why someone in Manning's shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit—a journalistic “Little Engine that Could” that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times. The prosecutor's “Yes Ma'am,” essentially conceded that core point of my testimony in order to keep it out of the trial. That's not a concession any lawyer makes lightly.

But that “Yes Ma'am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too.

A country's constitutional culture is made up of the stories we tell each other about the kind of nation we are. When we tell ourselves how strong our commitment to free speech is, we grit our teeth and tell of Nazis marching through Skokie. And when we think of how much we value our watchdog press, we tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg. Decades later, we sometimes forget that Ellsberg was prosecuted, smeared, and harassed. Instead, we express pride in a man's willingness to brave the odds, a newspaper’s willingness to take the risk of publishing, and a Supreme Court’s ability to tell an overbearing White House that no, you cannot shut up your opponents.

Whistleblowers play a critical constitutional role in our system of government, particularly in the area of national security. And they do so at great personal cost. The executive branch has enormous powers over national security and the exercise of that power is not fully transparent. Judicial doctrines like the “state secrets” doctrine allow an administration to limit judicial oversight. Congress’ oversight committees have also tended to leave the executive relatively free of constraints. Because the materials they see are classified, there remains little public oversight. Consider the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the interrogation torture practices during the immediate post 9/11 years: Its six thousand pages, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, are “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate.” But they are unavailable to the public.

Freedom of the press is anchored in our constitution because it reflects our fundamental belief that no institution can be its own watchdog. The government is full of well-intentioned and quite powerful inspectors general and similar internal accountability mechanisms. But like all big organizations, the national security branches of government include some people who aren't purely selfless public servants. Secrecy is necessary and justified in many cases. But as hard-earned experience has shown us time and again, it can be—and often is—used to cover up failure, avarice, or actions that simply will not survive that best of disinfectants, sunlight.

That’s where whistleblowers come in. They offer a pressure valve, constrained by the personal risk whistleblowers take, and fueled by whatever moral courage they can muster. Manning's statement in court yesterday showed that, at least in his motives, he was part of that long-respected tradition. But that’s also where the Manning prosecution comes in, too. The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.

by Yochai Benkler, The New Republic |  Read more:

Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Strange Game Theory of the Sequester

[ed. I suspect the only thing that will get Washington's attention is Wall Street.]

Barring the biggest Washington miracle since Dolly Madison ferreted paintings out of a burning White House in 1812, sequestration—the automatic, across-the-board cuts to defense, discretionary and certain health programs totaling $85 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, and $1.176 trillion over the next decade—will take effect March 1. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that these cuts will cost 750,000 jobs in 2013, and reduce gross domestic product for 2013 by up to 0.5%. The effects stand to be disastrous: that much is clear. But when it comes to the politics of the sequester—and the gamesmanship involved—very little is as it seems.

The White House has over the past month consistently given the impression that the president’s hands are tied, that the sequester—if not averted—will simply ripple through affected government agencies with no exceptions, and that the cuts will quickly hit hard in every state, with the administration powerless to stop the madness.

This isn’t quite true.

There are in fact measures that the president’s Office of Management and Budget could unilaterally take to at least mitigate the effects of the sequester in the near term. (More on this later.) But the agency is unlikely to take those measures. Why? Because making clear the impact of forced austerity may offer the best hope for discrediting and reversing it.

When faced with closures of national parks, shutdowns of government offices, delays in needed services like the disposition of federal benefits, and long lines at the airport due to a reduction in TSA personnel and air traffic controllers, the thinking goes, perhaps Congress will get moving on a less painful solution. “If they’re trying to put pressure on Congress, they’ll want the cuts to be felt pretty quickly,” says budget expert Stan Collender of Qorvis Communications.

So we have a cock-eyed scenario where the White House may well want to ramp up economy-strangling cuts quickly, in an inversion of the normal order. Unlike the Hippocratic oath, the watchword here is “first, do some harm.”

The question is, will it work? Can Obama—provided he decides not to hold the sequester’s pain at bay—make the pain come fast enough? Unfortunately for this plan, the picayune clockwork of government is likely to get in the way. A combination of complex budget rules, sequestration limits, and the ordinary instincts of agency heads may slow down the effects of the sequester and leave the public with thee mistaken impression—for a crucial couple of months—that austerity doesn’t really bite.

by David Dayen, Pacific Standard |  Read more:

Photo: Alex Brandon/AP via NPR