Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Luna Lee
[ed. Here's another amazing performance on the guzheng, very similar to the gayageum: Gorillaz - Hong Kong (Demon Days Live)]
At first, traditional Korean musician Luna Lee was like most others. She never associated the gayageum, a twelve-string instrument used for royal court music, with the guitar, let alone the electrified riffs of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Then a friend turned her on to the blues.
Since then, the young musician has surprised the world with jaw-dropping performances of iconic Hendrix tunes and other songs, putting a hip spin on the old instrument, which is often compared to a zither.
In March, her version of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” went viral after it was detected by Internet sites such as Reddit and publications such as Guitar World. Over 2 million YouTube hits later, Lee says the response will spur her efforts to keep the gayageum relevant.
“I’m so appreciative for all the feedback from around the world,” she said in an interview near Hongik University in Seoul. “It makes me want to try harder.”
Lee, who graduated from the Korean National University of Arts several years ago, began experimenting with the blues after a guitarist friend introduced her to “Tender Surrender,” one of Vaughan’s best-known songs.
“Before that I didn’t know much about guitar or band music. But listening to it made me realize that the gayageum is similar to the guitar and can blend well with guitar music,” she said.
“Gayageum has a technique called nong-hyun, which is quite similar to bending on the guitar. But nong-hyun can go further — it really has a dynamic range. This makes the gayageum perfect for playing the blues.”
Korean traditional instruments can hit certain pitches that “cannot be defined in Western scales,” Lee added, allowing her to catch all the nuances of blues guitar.
by Kim Young-jin, Korea Times | Read more:
Profiling Is Great ... Except When You Do It to Me
Got all that? Good—now let’s get to work. It’s your job to decide which 501(c)(4) applications represent legitimate social-welfare organizations, and which ones are from groups trying to hide their campaign activities. What’s more, you’ve got to sort the good from the bad very quickly, as you’re being inundated with applications. In 2010, your office received 1,735 applications for 501(c)(4) status. In 2011, the number jumped 30 percent, to 2,265, and in 2012 there was another 50 percent spike, this time to 3,357 applications.
So what do you do? You look for a shortcut. Someone at your office notices that a lot of the applications for 501(c)(4) status are from groups that claim to be part of the burgeoning Tea Party movement. Aha! When you’re looking for signs of political activity, wouldn’t it make sense to search for criteria related to the largest new political movement of our times? So that’s what you do: Without consulting senior managers, you and your colleagues set up a spreadsheet called “Be on the Lookout,” or BOLO, which spells out specific criteria for flagging potentially politically active groups. The spreadsheet lists keywords like “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” and “9/12 Project.” It also flags groups whose primary concerns are government spending, debt, and taxes, that criticize how the country is being run, or that advocate policies that seek to “make America a better place to live.”
We’ll get to whether this was right or wrong in a bit. For now, let’s note that there’s a name for the kind of shortcut that the IRS’s Cincinnati office used to pick out applications for greater scrutiny: “profiling.” By using superficial characteristics—groups’ names or mission statements—to determine whether they should be subject to deeper investigation, the IRS was acting like the TSA agent who pulls aside the guy in the turban, or the FBI agents that target mosques when investigating terrorism, or New York City cops who stop and frisk young black males in an effort to prevent crime.
All these efforts rely on the same intellectual justification—looking at surface characteristics makes sense because they’re a potential signal of deeper activity, whether it’s terrorism or crime or electioneering. As a right-wing blogger might say, “Not all Muslims are terrorists—but most terrorists are Muslims.” If you believe that, doesn’t it make sense to focus on Muslims when you’re fighting terrorism? Take it away, Michelle Malkin: “Where else are federal agents supposed to turn for help in uncovering terrorist plots by Islamic fanatics: Buddhist temples? Knights of Columbus meetings? Amish neighborhoods?”
That’s exactly what the IRS was doing with Tea Party groups. Not all Tea Party groups applying for 501(c)(4) status were engaged in campaign politics. But out of all the many groups that applied for such status, wouldn’t any reasonable person guess that a group called “Tea Party Patriots” is more likely to be engaged in campaign activity than, say, a group focused on rescuing abandoned puppies?
The deep irony of the IRS scandal is that people on the political right are being subjected to exactly the kind of profiling that they’ve long advocated in fighting terrorism and crime—and they don’t seem to appreciate it. I’m on their side: This case perfectly illustrates why profiling is wrong—why it’s inefficient, ineffective, and morally dubious. The IRS scandal should thus be a lesson to anyone who’s called for any kind of profiling, whether it’s racial, religious, or political. If you believe it was wrong for the government to single out certain groups just because of their names, then you’re really arguing that government officials should look for deeper characteristics when deciding whom to investigate. If you don’t like what happened at the IRS, then, you’re arguing that profiling is bad policy.
by Farhad Manjoo, Slate | Read more:
Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That
Beckoned by ads on the radio and in newspapers and on Craigslist, in the fall of 2011 women across America began applying to be among the 420 subjects in the Lybrido and Lybridos studies. Plenty were turned away when the trials filled. Lack of lust, when it creates emotional distress, meets the psychiatric profession’s clinical criteria for H.S.D.D., or hypoactive sexual-desire disorder. Researchers have set its prevalence among women between the ages of about 20 and 60 at between 10 and 15 percent. When you count the women who don’t quite meet the elaborate clinical threshold, the rate rises to around 30 percent. For a minor fraction of all the sexually indifferent (or repelled), the condition has been lifelong, regardless of whom they’re with or how long they’ve been with them. For middle-aged or older women, menopause and its aftermath may play a role, though its importance is much debated. For a sizable segment of the undesiring, the most common antidepressants, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, can be the culprit. Millions of American women are on S.S.R.I.'s, and many of them would have good use for a pill to revive the libido that has been chemically dulled as a side effect of the pill they take to buoy their mood.
But for many women, the cause of their sexual malaise appears to be monogamy itself. It is women much more than men who have H.S.D.D., who don’t feel heat for their steady partners. Evolutionary psychologists argue that this comes down to innate biology, that men are just made with stronger sex drives — so men will settle for the woman who’s always near. But the evidence for an inborn disparity in sexual motivation is debatable. A meta-analysis done by the psychologists Janet Hyde and Jennifer L. Petersen at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, incorporates more than 800 studies conducted between 1993 and 2007. It suggests that the very statistics evolutionary psychologists use to prove innate difference — like number of sexual partners or rates of masturbation — are heavily influenced by culture. All scientists really know is that the disparity in desire exists, at least after a relationship has lasted a while.
Dietrich Klusmann, a psychologist at the University of Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, has provided a glimpse into the bedrooms of longtime couples. His surveys, involving a total of almost 2,500 subjects, comprise one of the few systematic comparisons of female and male desire at progressive stages of committed relationships. He shows women and men in new relationships reporting, on average, more or less equal lust for each other. But for women who’ve been with their partners between one and four years, a dive begins — and continues, leaving male desire far higher. (Within this plunge, there is a notable pattern: over time, women who don’t live with their partners retain their desire much more than women who do.)
Lesbian couples seem to fare no better, and maybe worse, in keeping their sexual ardor for each other. The term “lesbian bed death,” coined by the University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz in the ‘80s, has been critiqued as overstatement but not quite as fiction. “In the lesbian community, the monogamy problem is being aired more and more,” Lisa Diamond, a professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, told me. “For years, gay men have been making open arrangements for sex outside the couple. Now, increasingly, gay women are doing it.”
Klusmann’s results are echoed by Lori Brotto, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who has worked clinically with scores of H.S.D.D. patients and who recently led the American Psychiatric Association’s attempt to better delineate the condition in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (H.S.D.D. is being reconceived as sexual interest/arousal disorder, S.I.A.D.) “The impact of relationship duration is something that comes up constantly,” she told me about her therapy sessions. “Sometimes I wonder whether it” — H.S.D.D. — “isn’t so much about libido as it is about boredom.”
But desire resists comprehension. Whether it is mainly a raw drive or a complex emotion is a question that has bedeviled psychiatry for decades. And the fading of desire can seem impossibly intricate. Is it a result of a lack of intimacy or its cause? One theory holds that it’s a challenge for both sexes to maintain passion over the long-term because it’s threatening to desire the same person from whom we seek security and true understanding. It leaves us feeling too vulnerable. As Stephen A. Mitchell, one of the leaders of relational psychoanalysis, described it: “Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central danger of emotional life. What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her.” Mitchell argued that ultimately the emotional meshing and vulnerability of committed relationships can become the most rewarding source of eros. Esther Perel, a couples therapist and author of “Mating in Captivity,” emphasizes a separateness at the heart of longstanding passion. “Many couples confuse love with merging,” she writes. “This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires distance.”
“What protects desire in monogamous partnerships is a great empirical question,” Brotto said. “I don’t think there have been any good studies.”
Brotto, who is married and has three children, went on: “I’m a woman in a long-term monogamous relationship. I myself have felt firsthand very high passionate desire, which then wanes. I can relate to my patients completely.” Sometimes she discusses the option of open relationships. But even to contemplate this alternative is to ignite fears in both women and men, and those override the pining for lust.
How much easier it would be if we could solve the insoluble by getting a prescription, stopping off at the drugstore and swallowing a pill.
by Daniel Bergner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jake Chessum for The New York Times
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Swiss Army Key Ring
[ed. If you've got a little time on your hands and want to make life a bit more... orderly, check this out.]
The design of this key holder is very similar in construction to a Swiss Army Knife. The keys are arranged on two parallel bars. Each key can be rotated into the handle for compact storage and rotated back out for use. So here is how to make a Swiss Army Key Ring.
by David Pescovitz, Boing Boing | Read more:
Facebook, One Year Later: What Really Happened in the Biggest IPO Flop Ever
After Facebook's disastrous debut, the preferred clients of big banks walked away with huge profits. How? Public documents and interviews with dozens of investment bankers and research analysts reveal that the Street caught wind of something the public didn't. The social network and the banks told half the story. Here is the other half.
Uma Swaminathan tuned the television set in the living room of her ranch style home in the suburbs of East Brunswick, N.J. to CNBC. It was 9:00 a.m. on May 18, 2012, a day the retired schoolteacher thought might make her rich. She logged onto her Vanguard brokerage account on her computer and placed an order for 5,000 shares of Facebook at $42 a share.
On TV, wearing his trademark hoodie, 28-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the world's largest social networking site, stood in the courtyard of Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. A crowd of eager Facebook employees held up company license plates and posters for the cameras. They'd stayed up all night at an employee "hack-a-thon" to celebrate the big day when Facebook was finally going public, in what might have been the most anticipated initial public offering in history. The boyish, blue-eyed Zuckerberg grinned, standing next to Bob Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq-OMX Stock Market, Inc., the largest electronic stock exchange in the United States.
With short hair, brown skin, and few wrinkles, Swaminathan looks much younger than her 68 years. She spent most of adult life as a suburban mom, making tofu for her daughter's friends at theater rehearsals, taking her three sons to soccer practice and Boy Scouts, and volunteering in the local community. She served a term as president of the Indian American Association of New Jersey.
Her interest in the stock market didn't develop until her husband died about 13 years ago. Her four children had already moved out to attend college or to pursue their careers. Swaminathan was left with her late husband's 401(k) retirement account, when she started dabbling in the market, investing in stable companies like Microsoft. Not long after, she began to follow the news coverage of initial public offerings (IPOs) -- when private companies enter the public market -- and came to know of the phenomenon known as the first day "pop." On the day that companies would debut on the stock market, the price would tend to shoot up before stabilizing. A year earlier, she watched as social networking site LinkedIn's stock price closed up 109 percent on its opening day.
She'd never placed such a big bet on just one stock, but she felt a personal connection to Facebook. She had been using the site to connect with family and friends since 2009, and almost everyone she knew had an account.
Now, as she watched the TV in eager anticipation, millions of shares were going to leave the hands of private investors and start trading, giving anyone with enough money a chance to own a slice of the social network giant. Silence descended as Zuckerberg came forward to deliver his speech: "I just want to say a few things, and then we'll ring this bell and we'll get back to work. Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here's the thing: our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected..."
Finally he reached the moment so many were waiting for: "So let's do this!" And the opening bell sounded as he signed the digital screen on the podium before him: "To a more open and connected world," he wrote. His handwritten message instantaneously appeared in Times Square just above the giant illuminated NASDAQ exchange ticker.
Facebook shares hit the market at an opening price of $38. Minutes later, Swaminathan's online order was executed, and the retired schoolteacher had just spent approximately half her life savings.
I: THE OFFERING
For Mark Zuckerberg, selling Facebook shares on the public market had a clear downside. Besides the headache of releasing a company's financial details to the public, he worried that increased scrutiny and push for profits would compromise Facebook's mission.
But like any growth-stage company, Facebook needed money, and private companies face restrictions on how much stock they can issue for cash. In early 2011, Goldman Sachs helped Facebook conjure IPO-type money without an actual IPO by creating a special investment product to sell its private shares to Goldman's wealthiest clients. But when the New York Times exposed the plan, the SEC began to investigate the transaction. Soon after, Zuckerberg decided to take the company public. In late 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook was anticipating an IPO valuation of $100 billion -- nearly four times more than Google's market cap when it went public in 2004.
On February 1, 2012, Facebook filed its Form S-1 -- effectively a birth certificate for publicly traded companies -- containing everything an investor needs to know before buying shares at an IPO, including basic financial information and the business model. Facebook's S-1 showed that the company was primarily in the display-advertising business, with a net profit of $1 billion in 2011 from total revenue of $3.7 billion.
The S-1 is especially meaningful to investment banks. Facebook listed its underwriters -- the banks picked to buy and sell shares on the IPO -- near the front of the document, from left to right, in order of responsibility, with Morgan Stanley in the coveted "left lead" position.
This put Facebook's IPO in the hands of one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated bankers: Michael Grimes, co-head of global technology banking at Morgan Stanley's Menlo Park office, located just a few miles north of Facebook's headquarters.
On TV, wearing his trademark hoodie, 28-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the world's largest social networking site, stood in the courtyard of Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. A crowd of eager Facebook employees held up company license plates and posters for the cameras. They'd stayed up all night at an employee "hack-a-thon" to celebrate the big day when Facebook was finally going public, in what might have been the most anticipated initial public offering in history. The boyish, blue-eyed Zuckerberg grinned, standing next to Bob Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq-OMX Stock Market, Inc., the largest electronic stock exchange in the United States.
With short hair, brown skin, and few wrinkles, Swaminathan looks much younger than her 68 years. She spent most of adult life as a suburban mom, making tofu for her daughter's friends at theater rehearsals, taking her three sons to soccer practice and Boy Scouts, and volunteering in the local community. She served a term as president of the Indian American Association of New Jersey.
Her interest in the stock market didn't develop until her husband died about 13 years ago. Her four children had already moved out to attend college or to pursue their careers. Swaminathan was left with her late husband's 401(k) retirement account, when she started dabbling in the market, investing in stable companies like Microsoft. Not long after, she began to follow the news coverage of initial public offerings (IPOs) -- when private companies enter the public market -- and came to know of the phenomenon known as the first day "pop." On the day that companies would debut on the stock market, the price would tend to shoot up before stabilizing. A year earlier, she watched as social networking site LinkedIn's stock price closed up 109 percent on its opening day.
She'd never placed such a big bet on just one stock, but she felt a personal connection to Facebook. She had been using the site to connect with family and friends since 2009, and almost everyone she knew had an account.
Now, as she watched the TV in eager anticipation, millions of shares were going to leave the hands of private investors and start trading, giving anyone with enough money a chance to own a slice of the social network giant. Silence descended as Zuckerberg came forward to deliver his speech: "I just want to say a few things, and then we'll ring this bell and we'll get back to work. Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here's the thing: our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected..."
Finally he reached the moment so many were waiting for: "So let's do this!" And the opening bell sounded as he signed the digital screen on the podium before him: "To a more open and connected world," he wrote. His handwritten message instantaneously appeared in Times Square just above the giant illuminated NASDAQ exchange ticker.
Facebook shares hit the market at an opening price of $38. Minutes later, Swaminathan's online order was executed, and the retired schoolteacher had just spent approximately half her life savings.
I: THE OFFERING
For Mark Zuckerberg, selling Facebook shares on the public market had a clear downside. Besides the headache of releasing a company's financial details to the public, he worried that increased scrutiny and push for profits would compromise Facebook's mission.
But like any growth-stage company, Facebook needed money, and private companies face restrictions on how much stock they can issue for cash. In early 2011, Goldman Sachs helped Facebook conjure IPO-type money without an actual IPO by creating a special investment product to sell its private shares to Goldman's wealthiest clients. But when the New York Times exposed the plan, the SEC began to investigate the transaction. Soon after, Zuckerberg decided to take the company public. In late 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook was anticipating an IPO valuation of $100 billion -- nearly four times more than Google's market cap when it went public in 2004.
On February 1, 2012, Facebook filed its Form S-1 -- effectively a birth certificate for publicly traded companies -- containing everything an investor needs to know before buying shares at an IPO, including basic financial information and the business model. Facebook's S-1 showed that the company was primarily in the display-advertising business, with a net profit of $1 billion in 2011 from total revenue of $3.7 billion.
The S-1 is especially meaningful to investment banks. Facebook listed its underwriters -- the banks picked to buy and sell shares on the IPO -- near the front of the document, from left to right, in order of responsibility, with Morgan Stanley in the coveted "left lead" position.
This put Facebook's IPO in the hands of one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated bankers: Michael Grimes, co-head of global technology banking at Morgan Stanley's Menlo Park office, located just a few miles north of Facebook's headquarters.
by Khadeeja Safdar, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How to Buy Happiness
If experiences increase happiness and giving increases happiness, can we combine them to create the perfect happiness intervention? We tried this in a recent experiment, in which we handed out Starbucks gift cards on a university campus.
We told some people to head to Starbucks and buy something for themselves. We told others to pass their gift card along to someone else. And we told a third group of people to use the gift card to buy something for someone else — with the additional requirement that they actually hang out with that person at Starbucks.
Who was happiest? Those who treated someone else and shared in that experience with them. So the cost of increasing your happiness may be as cheap as two cups of coffee.
Taken together, the new science of spending points to a surprising conclusion: How we use our money may matter as much or more than how much of it we've got. Which means that rather than waiting to see whether you find $1 million under your mattress tomorrow, you can make yourself happier today. Switching your spending to buying experiences — for both yourself and others — can lead to more happiness than even the most amazingly Amazonian rain shower.
We told some people to head to Starbucks and buy something for themselves. We told others to pass their gift card along to someone else. And we told a third group of people to use the gift card to buy something for someone else — with the additional requirement that they actually hang out with that person at Starbucks.Who was happiest? Those who treated someone else and shared in that experience with them. So the cost of increasing your happiness may be as cheap as two cups of coffee.
Taken together, the new science of spending points to a surprising conclusion: How we use our money may matter as much or more than how much of it we've got. Which means that rather than waiting to see whether you find $1 million under your mattress tomorrow, you can make yourself happier today. Switching your spending to buying experiences — for both yourself and others — can lead to more happiness than even the most amazingly Amazonian rain shower.
by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Anthony Russo / For The Times
Argument with Myself
Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. During this time he was subjected to thousands of hours of tests, of which naturally he had no recall; he provided data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory. Since his death his brain has been shaved into 2401 slices, each 70 microns thick, compared in one account to the slivers of ginger served with sushi. Suzanne Corkin, an MIT neuroscientist, first met him in 1962 and after 1980 became his lead investigator and ‘sole keeper’. Permanent Present Tense is her account of Henry Gustave Molaison – his full identity can finally be revealed – and the historic contribution he made to science.
Corkin had a reputation for strict policing of access to Henry, a charge she happily concedes: ‘I did not want him to become a sideshow attraction – the man without a memory.’ After the death of his mother, his last thirty years were spent at a Connecticut nursing home in strict anonymity, with staff sworn to secrecy and filming prohibited. More than a hundred carefully screened researchers were admitted over the years to perform brain scans and cognitive tests, but were never told his name. Corkin’s lucid, well-organised telling of Henry’s story merges intimate case history with an account of the current scientific understanding and how it was reached.
Henry’s surgery was undertaken in an era of freewheeling experiment in pursuit of the idea that memories were indelible snapshots of sense experience, stored in chronological sequence like the frames of a celluloid film. Over the course of his decades as a test subject, the field was colonised by information theory, the processes of memory divided like those of a computer into encoding, storage and retrieval. Now the post-mortem scanning and mapping of Henry’s brain is exposing the artificiality of these divisions and revealing complexities that no computer can emulate.
by Mike Jay, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: via:
Could WordPress be the next Tumblr?
Giant media and internet companies keep scooping up social-media services: among others, MySpace went to News Corp, YouTube to Google, Instagram to Facebook, and now Tumblr to Yahoo. For the young founders and their investors, the trajectory in each case has been 1) create a proprietary platform; 2) lure gazillions of users; 3) sell for huge amounts of money to a profitable enterprise that will figure out how to monetize all those users.
Now consider a 20-something entrepreneur named Matt Mullenweg. Like the founders of so many other important platforms, he has been coding most of his life. In the decade of its existence, his blogging software,WordPress, has become an essential part of the internet, powering about 20% of all websites. If the media and internet giants were bidding on Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and a variety of ancillary products, I'm betting they'd wave checks in the range of the $1.1bn or so that Yahoo is said to be paying for Tumblr.
Here's the thing, though. WordPress isn't like the other products I just mentioned, and Mullenweg, who told me late last year he has no intention of selling out, is a different kind of founder. I consider WordPress to be the most important platform around because it is a) open and b) controlled by a young man and team whose hearts and minds, from my perspective, are precisely in the right place at the right time. I admire them enormously.
It's not that Mullenweg is against making money. In fact, he and Automattic make a lot of it (though he doesn't say how much) via WordPress.com, which offers free, hosted blogs and a variety of for-pay services, including major corporate and media customers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. The revenues are enough that the company has sunk "tens of millions" of dollars into WordPress development, to improve it and support its millions of users, individual and corporate.
That's WordPress.com, the commercial arm of Mullenweg's operations. But more important, in the long run, is WordPress.org, which offers the software for free, open-source. This means anyone can download it at no charge, modify it at will and use it on his or her own server. I'm among the countless people who have done that, and I've come to rely on it for several blogs I maintain. (I also have several WordPress.com blogs, such as a place for some classroom work).
The WordPress community is enormous in part because, like other major open-source projects, it has become the center of an ecosystem. There are tens of thousands of extensions available for WordPress – software add-ons that do everything from curb comment spam to create online stores to you name it, plus vast numbers of "themes" that give users flexiblity in how the site will look and feel for the user. Automattic has created a few of the plug-ins, but third-party developers have done the vast majority. Some are free to use, like the core software, while others come with a charge.
Contrast this with all of the other major for-profit platform operations, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. To a greater or lesser degree, they allow developers to create applications to run on or alongside their platforms, but they are absolutely in control. The third-party developers and their products live essentially at the whim of the platform owners, and so does the content that we (you and I) put into their computers. We get convenience in return, but we need to always keep in mind who's running things. With WordPress.org sites, we are in control.
Now consider a 20-something entrepreneur named Matt Mullenweg. Like the founders of so many other important platforms, he has been coding most of his life. In the decade of its existence, his blogging software,WordPress, has become an essential part of the internet, powering about 20% of all websites. If the media and internet giants were bidding on Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and a variety of ancillary products, I'm betting they'd wave checks in the range of the $1.1bn or so that Yahoo is said to be paying for Tumblr.Here's the thing, though. WordPress isn't like the other products I just mentioned, and Mullenweg, who told me late last year he has no intention of selling out, is a different kind of founder. I consider WordPress to be the most important platform around because it is a) open and b) controlled by a young man and team whose hearts and minds, from my perspective, are precisely in the right place at the right time. I admire them enormously.
It's not that Mullenweg is against making money. In fact, he and Automattic make a lot of it (though he doesn't say how much) via WordPress.com, which offers free, hosted blogs and a variety of for-pay services, including major corporate and media customers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. The revenues are enough that the company has sunk "tens of millions" of dollars into WordPress development, to improve it and support its millions of users, individual and corporate.
That's WordPress.com, the commercial arm of Mullenweg's operations. But more important, in the long run, is WordPress.org, which offers the software for free, open-source. This means anyone can download it at no charge, modify it at will and use it on his or her own server. I'm among the countless people who have done that, and I've come to rely on it for several blogs I maintain. (I also have several WordPress.com blogs, such as a place for some classroom work).
The WordPress community is enormous in part because, like other major open-source projects, it has become the center of an ecosystem. There are tens of thousands of extensions available for WordPress – software add-ons that do everything from curb comment spam to create online stores to you name it, plus vast numbers of "themes" that give users flexiblity in how the site will look and feel for the user. Automattic has created a few of the plug-ins, but third-party developers have done the vast majority. Some are free to use, like the core software, while others come with a charge.
Contrast this with all of the other major for-profit platform operations, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. To a greater or lesser degree, they allow developers to create applications to run on or alongside their platforms, but they are absolutely in control. The third-party developers and their products live essentially at the whim of the platform owners, and so does the content that we (you and I) put into their computers. We get convenience in return, but we need to always keep in mind who's running things. With WordPress.org sites, we are in control.
by Dan Gillmor, The Guardian | Read more:
Image via:
Maxed Out on Everest
Trudging nose to butt up the ropes that had been fixed to the steep slope, Panuru and I were wedged between strangers above us and below us. The day before, at Camp III, our team had been part of a small group. But when we woke up this morning, we were stunned to see an endless line of climbers passing near our tents.
Now, bumper to bumper at 27,000 feet, we were forced to move at exactly the same speed as everyone else, regardless of strength or ability. In the swirling darkness before midnight, I gazed up at the string of lights, climbers’ headlamps, rising into the black sky. Above me were more than a hundred slow-moving climbers. In one rocky section at least 20 people were attached to a single ratty rope anchored by a single badly bent picket pounded into the ice. If the picket popped, the rope or carabiner would instantly snap from the weight of two dozen falling climbers, and they would all cartwheel down the face to their death.
Panuru, the lead Sherpa of our team, and I unclipped from the lines, swerved out into open ice, and began soloing—for experienced mountaineers, a safer option. Twenty minutes later, another corpse. Still attached to the line of ropes, he was sitting in the snow, frozen solid as stone, his face black, his eyes wide open. (...)
How different it was 50 years ago when, on May 1, 1963, James Whittaker, accompanied only by Sherpa Nawang Gombu, became the first American to reach the summit of the world. “Big Jim” did it by climbing the Southeast Ridge, the same route pioneered in 1953 by the peerless New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Whittaker had climbed Mount McKinley a few years before, and it was Gombu’s third trip to Everest. Three weeks after Whittaker and Gombu’s ascent, in an unprecedented act of boldness, teammates Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld clawed their way up a completely new route, the West Ridge. (The two men had been teammates on the 1960 American Pakistan Karakoram Expedition.) On that same day Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad made the second American ascent of the Southeast Ridge. The two teams managed to meet below the summit, but by then it was dark, and they were forced to bivouac at 28,000 feet—a risky, last-ditch option never before attempted. Without tents, sleeping bags, stoves, Sherpas, oxygen, water, or food, they weren’t expected to survive.
Our team was on Everest to mark the anniversary of that expedition. Yet as we witnessed, the mountain has become an icon for everything that is wrong with climbing. Unlike in 1963, when only six people reached the top, in the spring of 2012 more than 500 mobbed the summit. When I arrived at the apex on May 25, it was so crowded I couldn’t find a place to stand. Meanwhile, down below at the Hillary Step the lines were so long that some people going up waited more than two hours, shivering, growing weak—this even though the weather was excellent. If these throngs of climbers had been caught in a storm, as others were in 1996, the death toll could have been staggering.
Everest has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half century ago. Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions. The two standard routes, the Northeast Ridge and the Southeast Ridge, are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted, with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps. And then there are the deaths. Besides the four climbers who perished on the Southeast Ridge, six others lost their lives in 2012, including three Sherpas.
Clearly the world’s highest peak is broken. But if you talk to the people who know it best, they’ll tell you it’s not beyond repair.
by Mark Jenkins, National Geographic | Read more:
Photo: Subin Thakuri, Utmost Adventure Trekking
Monday, May 20, 2013
Dr. Frankenstein Needs His Own Hippocratic Oath
In the next war, instead of a soldier going on a reconnaissance mission into enemy territory, consider this possibility: a cloud of “micro air vehicles,” flying cyborgs, with built-in cameras and microphones, that could be guided by remote control. What military commander wouldn’t want that?
DARPA, the research wing of the Department of Defense, has been on the case. A decade ago, they experimented with building synthetic drones. The Nano Hummingbird can stay aloft for eleven minutes; the DelFry Micro for just three. Then they realized that a far better type of flying machine already existed. In addition to being able to cover long distances while economizing energy, insects have a simple nervous system that was relatively easy to harness.
Scientists at the University of California Berkeley have discovered how to stimulate a beetle’s brain to make it start and stop flying. They poked a hole in the exoskeleton, threading in microscopically thin steel wire. A package of electronics mounted with beeswax on the beetle’s back carries the camera. When electricity is sent into the beetle’s optic lobe, the bug took flight. The lab experiment was a success.
The vignette appears midway through Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes’ fascinating book about our latest methods of transforming animal bodies. While the technology she describes is new, humans have been altering animals, in a sense, for hundreds of thousands of years. The first animal we started tailoring may have been ourselves, when a distant ancestor dried an animal skin and managed to wrap it around her torso such that it could hold a baby securely (as described in “We Built These Bodies” from the premier issue of Nautilus). This saved a lot of energy, freed up her arms to perform other tasks, and changed the course of our evolution, allowing babies’ brains to develop more outside the womb. With the advent of agriculture, humans became much more sophisticated about breeding animals and crossing varieties of plants. Shaping the living things around us emerged as a defining feature of our species. Now transgenic technology—tinkering more directly with an organism’s genome—is poised to again transform the bodies of animals around us. Yet our society is far from having clear conclusions or policies on what modifications we should allow ethically.
We don’t want shampoo being rubbed in Snuffy’s eyes to test the new no-tear formula, but if Snuffy were a pig whose organs could be genetically modified to assimilate easily into human tissue, polls say the majority of us are in favor. We nod our heads when Peter Singer calls the prioritization of human needs “speciesism,” but now what about those new pig lungs for your nephew with cystic fibrosis?
DARPA, the research wing of the Department of Defense, has been on the case. A decade ago, they experimented with building synthetic drones. The Nano Hummingbird can stay aloft for eleven minutes; the DelFry Micro for just three. Then they realized that a far better type of flying machine already existed. In addition to being able to cover long distances while economizing energy, insects have a simple nervous system that was relatively easy to harness.Scientists at the University of California Berkeley have discovered how to stimulate a beetle’s brain to make it start and stop flying. They poked a hole in the exoskeleton, threading in microscopically thin steel wire. A package of electronics mounted with beeswax on the beetle’s back carries the camera. When electricity is sent into the beetle’s optic lobe, the bug took flight. The lab experiment was a success.
The vignette appears midway through Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes’ fascinating book about our latest methods of transforming animal bodies. While the technology she describes is new, humans have been altering animals, in a sense, for hundreds of thousands of years. The first animal we started tailoring may have been ourselves, when a distant ancestor dried an animal skin and managed to wrap it around her torso such that it could hold a baby securely (as described in “We Built These Bodies” from the premier issue of Nautilus). This saved a lot of energy, freed up her arms to perform other tasks, and changed the course of our evolution, allowing babies’ brains to develop more outside the womb. With the advent of agriculture, humans became much more sophisticated about breeding animals and crossing varieties of plants. Shaping the living things around us emerged as a defining feature of our species. Now transgenic technology—tinkering more directly with an organism’s genome—is poised to again transform the bodies of animals around us. Yet our society is far from having clear conclusions or policies on what modifications we should allow ethically.
We don’t want shampoo being rubbed in Snuffy’s eyes to test the new no-tear formula, but if Snuffy were a pig whose organs could be genetically modified to assimilate easily into human tissue, polls say the majority of us are in favor. We nod our heads when Peter Singer calls the prioritization of human needs “speciesism,” but now what about those new pig lungs for your nephew with cystic fibrosis?
by Luba Ostashevsky, Nautilus | Read more:
Illustration by Diego Patino/SciAm/FSG
How to Legalize Pot
[ed. The NY Times has been reading Duck Soup. See: Holding Our Breath]
So I was interested to learn, 11 years later, that Kleiman is leading the team hired to advise Washington State as it designs something the modern world has never seen: a fully legal commercial market in cannabis. Washington is one of the first two states (Colorado is the other) to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana as a recreational drug for consumers 21 and over. The marijuana debate has entered a new stage. Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.
“At some point you have to say, a law that people don’t obey is a bad law,” Kleiman told me when I asked how his views had evolved. He has not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market.
Ah, but what does that look like? (...)
One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers — the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry — a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. “When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales,” said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. “And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers.”
What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry — a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors. It would help, too, to let individuals grow a few plants at home — something Colorado’s new law permits but Washington’s does not, because polling showed Washingtonians didn’t want that.
If you read the proposal Kleiman’s team submitted to Washington State, you may be a little boggled by the complexities of turning an illicit herb into a regulated, safe, consumer-friendly business. Among the things on the to-do list: certifying labs to test for potency and contamination. (Pot can contain, among other nasty things, pesticides, molds and salmonella.) Devising rules on labeling, so users know what they’re getting. Hiring inspectors, to make sure the sellers comply. Establishing limits on advertising, because you don’t want allowing to become promoting. And all these rules must account not just for smoking but for pot pastries, pot candies, pot-infused beverages, pot lozenges, pot ice cream, pot vapor inhalers.
by Bill Keller, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CBS/IsTockPhoto
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)