Sunday, June 23, 2013
The Real People
In San Cristóbal de las Casas, on a street whose name I’ve forgotten, a dog bit my ankle. I kicked the mongrel in the teeth. He yelped, and a sharp voice called him away. I peeled down my sock. Not much blood, but the skin was broken in three places.
I raced back to the garden guesthouse where I lived, high up on the hill. I showed Gabriel the wound and told him the dog’s owner had no vaccination papers. Promises, but no proof. A scientist and my host, Gabriel stretched the skin with his right hand while little Isabella tugged the fingers of his left. It was almost time for comida and the kids were clutching their bellies in mock starvation.
“It’s not very deep,” he said. “Wash it with soap and water.”
In the bathroom, I picked off jagged crumbles of soap with my thumbnail and jammed them into the small holes.
The table was laden with tamales, salad, and agua de Jamaica, but I couldn’t eat. Before leaving the States, I’d received three rabies boosters and a warning I’d need more if I was bitten. I said, “Shouldn’t I see a doctor?”
Gabriel served himself. “If you want.”
The children got boisterous and shared a joke with their father. I thirsted down several glasses of the magenta agua as if it were medicine. Bright sun shone off the clay tiles and steeped the table the color of dark tea. The wood was probably mahogany, harvested from deep in the jungle. Since I started my job as a tour guide at the Lacandon culture museum several months ago, I’d wanted to go to the jungle. People said it was a place that swallowed you and burst green over your head. The lakes were pure and sun warmed. The Lacandons, supposedly the closest living descendents of the ancient Mayans, rarely engaged with the modern world.
I couldn’t stay quiet. I didn’t understand why Gabriel wasn’t worried, too. “Do you think they have the shots at the hospital?”
He kissed his daughter on the head. He said if I was concerned I could go to the hospital in Tuxtla, the state capital, two hours over the mountains. “The bus is very cheap.”
That night I went to the bar, El Cocodrilo, where they played “Black Magic Woman” three times in an hour. I ached for Fernando. In the months when we were together, we ordered another tequila every time the song came on, even if the last round was still full. Fernando hated Santana. I’d never heard of him, though I recognized the song.
There were a lot of things I’d never heard of. I was 17 and had graduated high school early to come here, to grow up a little, as I’d told my parents, who’d paid for my flight and helped me find a host family. Fernando was a Mexican-American with a heart-shaped face who’d just finished a master’s in teaching. He was spending the summer joyriding around his father’s country in a brown sweater. Tonight I was desperate to tell him about the dog. I wasn’t in pain, but I was scared.
But five days ago, Fernando’s fiancée had arrived.
I sipped tequila and tried to forget, and soon people I knew arrived: Stuart, the pale, skinny Englishman; Manuel, the Spanish museum director; and Zelda from Amsterdam who wore blue mascara. Stuart ordered drinks all around until two tequila shots and a Negro Modelo stared up at me.
“Like a fish, my young friend,” Stuart said, leaning into me.
Stuart was a friend of Gloria and Gabriel. They’d introduced him as “someone your own age,” though Stuart was 35, a teacher in the local schools. He’d taken me on a motorcycle tour of the San Cristóbal countryside. In the afternoons, he played piano in the museum courtyard. I told Stuart about the dog. “What should I do?”
“You told Gabriel, yeah? He’ll take care of you.” He looked at me with moony eyes, head too large for his frame. “Let’s dance,” he said.
Fernando didn’t like to dance; Stuart was smooth and easy on the floor. He mentored me on how I should move my body. “Not so stiff in the hips. You’re all shoulders. Open up more. Here.” Tonight, as on other nights, he linked an orangutan arm around my waist and guided me. “Easy, easy,” he said. “Let me do it.”
The faster numbers I danced with Zelda. We threw our arms around, whiplashing our necks, and laughed, baring teeth.
“I have to get rabies shots!” I said over the music.
“I never want to leave this place!” she shouted back.
Zelda and Manuel had just come back from the jungle. On their trips, the museum staff paid the Lacandon artists for the their handicrafts sold at the gift shop and oversaw the construction of casas de cultura, Manuel’s pet project. The casas were, as far as I could tell from the pictures passed around over lunch, simple wooden structures with a roof and dirt floor, open on all sides. Fat splintery posts supported the ceiling and displayed black-and-white photographs taken more than fifty years ago by the museum’s dead founder. The idea was to provide images of the community’s history in a public space. Lacandon youth could see their ancestors performing now-forgotten ceremonies. In the old pictures, the long-haired Lacandons wore cloth T-shirts down to their knees, walked barefoot, and carried curved machetes. As I said in my twice-daily tours, they called themselves the Hach Winik, the Real People.
Yet most of the people in the color photos documenting the jungle trips were museum staff. When I asked Zelda if the Lacandons themselves visited the casas, she said, “Of course. Why wouldn’t they?” I guess I thought they’d have better things to do, their own dramas to live. Kids wouldn’t be impressed by some backward-looking gringos hanging up pictures of their grandparents. Still, I was desperate to get to the jungle. When Manuel had invited Zelda on this last trip, I asked if I could go along, but he’d said there was no room. I could go on the next one. But I’d heard that before. When the lists of invitees were drawn up, nobody ever thought of me. On the dance floor maybe, but not for the jungle.
I raced back to the garden guesthouse where I lived, high up on the hill. I showed Gabriel the wound and told him the dog’s owner had no vaccination papers. Promises, but no proof. A scientist and my host, Gabriel stretched the skin with his right hand while little Isabella tugged the fingers of his left. It was almost time for comida and the kids were clutching their bellies in mock starvation. “It’s not very deep,” he said. “Wash it with soap and water.”
In the bathroom, I picked off jagged crumbles of soap with my thumbnail and jammed them into the small holes.
The table was laden with tamales, salad, and agua de Jamaica, but I couldn’t eat. Before leaving the States, I’d received three rabies boosters and a warning I’d need more if I was bitten. I said, “Shouldn’t I see a doctor?”
Gabriel served himself. “If you want.”
The children got boisterous and shared a joke with their father. I thirsted down several glasses of the magenta agua as if it were medicine. Bright sun shone off the clay tiles and steeped the table the color of dark tea. The wood was probably mahogany, harvested from deep in the jungle. Since I started my job as a tour guide at the Lacandon culture museum several months ago, I’d wanted to go to the jungle. People said it was a place that swallowed you and burst green over your head. The lakes were pure and sun warmed. The Lacandons, supposedly the closest living descendents of the ancient Mayans, rarely engaged with the modern world.
I couldn’t stay quiet. I didn’t understand why Gabriel wasn’t worried, too. “Do you think they have the shots at the hospital?”
He kissed his daughter on the head. He said if I was concerned I could go to the hospital in Tuxtla, the state capital, two hours over the mountains. “The bus is very cheap.”
That night I went to the bar, El Cocodrilo, where they played “Black Magic Woman” three times in an hour. I ached for Fernando. In the months when we were together, we ordered another tequila every time the song came on, even if the last round was still full. Fernando hated Santana. I’d never heard of him, though I recognized the song.
There were a lot of things I’d never heard of. I was 17 and had graduated high school early to come here, to grow up a little, as I’d told my parents, who’d paid for my flight and helped me find a host family. Fernando was a Mexican-American with a heart-shaped face who’d just finished a master’s in teaching. He was spending the summer joyriding around his father’s country in a brown sweater. Tonight I was desperate to tell him about the dog. I wasn’t in pain, but I was scared.
But five days ago, Fernando’s fiancée had arrived.
I sipped tequila and tried to forget, and soon people I knew arrived: Stuart, the pale, skinny Englishman; Manuel, the Spanish museum director; and Zelda from Amsterdam who wore blue mascara. Stuart ordered drinks all around until two tequila shots and a Negro Modelo stared up at me.
“Like a fish, my young friend,” Stuart said, leaning into me.
Stuart was a friend of Gloria and Gabriel. They’d introduced him as “someone your own age,” though Stuart was 35, a teacher in the local schools. He’d taken me on a motorcycle tour of the San Cristóbal countryside. In the afternoons, he played piano in the museum courtyard. I told Stuart about the dog. “What should I do?”
“You told Gabriel, yeah? He’ll take care of you.” He looked at me with moony eyes, head too large for his frame. “Let’s dance,” he said.
Fernando didn’t like to dance; Stuart was smooth and easy on the floor. He mentored me on how I should move my body. “Not so stiff in the hips. You’re all shoulders. Open up more. Here.” Tonight, as on other nights, he linked an orangutan arm around my waist and guided me. “Easy, easy,” he said. “Let me do it.”
The faster numbers I danced with Zelda. We threw our arms around, whiplashing our necks, and laughed, baring teeth.
“I have to get rabies shots!” I said over the music.
“I never want to leave this place!” she shouted back.
Zelda and Manuel had just come back from the jungle. On their trips, the museum staff paid the Lacandon artists for the their handicrafts sold at the gift shop and oversaw the construction of casas de cultura, Manuel’s pet project. The casas were, as far as I could tell from the pictures passed around over lunch, simple wooden structures with a roof and dirt floor, open on all sides. Fat splintery posts supported the ceiling and displayed black-and-white photographs taken more than fifty years ago by the museum’s dead founder. The idea was to provide images of the community’s history in a public space. Lacandon youth could see their ancestors performing now-forgotten ceremonies. In the old pictures, the long-haired Lacandons wore cloth T-shirts down to their knees, walked barefoot, and carried curved machetes. As I said in my twice-daily tours, they called themselves the Hach Winik, the Real People.
Yet most of the people in the color photos documenting the jungle trips were museum staff. When I asked Zelda if the Lacandons themselves visited the casas, she said, “Of course. Why wouldn’t they?” I guess I thought they’d have better things to do, their own dramas to live. Kids wouldn’t be impressed by some backward-looking gringos hanging up pictures of their grandparents. Still, I was desperate to get to the jungle. When Manuel had invited Zelda on this last trip, I asked if I could go along, but he’d said there was no room. I could go on the next one. But I’d heard that before. When the lists of invitees were drawn up, nobody ever thought of me. On the dance floor maybe, but not for the jungle.
by Jennifer Acker, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Photo by caliopedreams via Flickr.
For Solazyme, a Side Trip on the Way to Clean Fuel
Starting when they became friends in freshman year at Emory University in Atlanta, Jonathan S. Wolfson and Harrison F. Dillon would take off into the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado for weeks at time. They spent their days hiking in the wilderness and their nights drinking bourbon by the campfire, talking big about how one day they would build a company that would help preserve the environment they both loved.
They graduated, and the backpacking trips grew shorter and further between. Mr. Dillon went on to earn a Ph.D. in genetics and a law degree, and ended up working as a biotech patent lawyer in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wolfson received law and business degrees from New York University and eventually started a software business. But the two still got together every year. And they kept talking about the company that, they imagined as time went on, would use biotechnology to create renewable energy.
“These were delusional rantings of kids,” said Mr. Wolfson, who, like Mr. Dillon, is now 42.
Then Mr. Dillon found microalgae, and delusional became real. Microalgae, a large and diverse group of single-celled plants, produce a variety of substances, including oils, and are thought to be responsible for most of the fossilized oil deposits in the earth. These, it seemed, were micro-organisms with potential. With prodding, they could be re-engineered to make fuel.
So in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon’s garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.
Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.
Sold under the brand name Algenist, the product, costing $79 for a one-ounce bottle, would seem to have nothing in common with oil refineries and transportation fuel. But along with other niche products that the company can sell at a premium, it may be just the thing that lets Solazyme coast past the point where so many other clean-tech companies have run out of gas: the so-called Valley of Death, where young businesses stall trying to shift to commercial-scale production. (...)
“The problem with a lot of clean-tech deals is that they have been about the way you make things in high volume or in production, which means you can’t prove out the ideas unless you build factories and actually make things in volume,” said Andrew S. Rappaport, a venture capitalist who is a board member of Alta Devices, a solar film start-up.
That company is one of a handful that, like Solazyme, is pursuing niche markets for its core product, in its instance developing fast-charging cases for smartphones and tablets, until it can produce low-cost, commercial quantities of solar materials for homes and businesses. A Bay Area start-up called Amyris, meanwhile, has shifted its genetically engineered yeast toward chemicals and cosmetic ingredients as it tries to build a biofuel business.
by Diane Cardwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson
They graduated, and the backpacking trips grew shorter and further between. Mr. Dillon went on to earn a Ph.D. in genetics and a law degree, and ended up working as a biotech patent lawyer in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wolfson received law and business degrees from New York University and eventually started a software business. But the two still got together every year. And they kept talking about the company that, they imagined as time went on, would use biotechnology to create renewable energy.“These were delusional rantings of kids,” said Mr. Wolfson, who, like Mr. Dillon, is now 42.
Then Mr. Dillon found microalgae, and delusional became real. Microalgae, a large and diverse group of single-celled plants, produce a variety of substances, including oils, and are thought to be responsible for most of the fossilized oil deposits in the earth. These, it seemed, were micro-organisms with potential. With prodding, they could be re-engineered to make fuel.
So in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon’s garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.
Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.
Sold under the brand name Algenist, the product, costing $79 for a one-ounce bottle, would seem to have nothing in common with oil refineries and transportation fuel. But along with other niche products that the company can sell at a premium, it may be just the thing that lets Solazyme coast past the point where so many other clean-tech companies have run out of gas: the so-called Valley of Death, where young businesses stall trying to shift to commercial-scale production. (...)
“The problem with a lot of clean-tech deals is that they have been about the way you make things in high volume or in production, which means you can’t prove out the ideas unless you build factories and actually make things in volume,” said Andrew S. Rappaport, a venture capitalist who is a board member of Alta Devices, a solar film start-up.
That company is one of a handful that, like Solazyme, is pursuing niche markets for its core product, in its instance developing fast-charging cases for smartphones and tablets, until it can produce low-cost, commercial quantities of solar materials for homes and businesses. A Bay Area start-up called Amyris, meanwhile, has shifted its genetically engineered yeast toward chemicals and cosmetic ingredients as it tries to build a biofuel business.
by Diane Cardwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson
Flowers That Can Speak
Even if we don’t talk to them, flowers communicate with us. People respond to them with lit-up faces and the "aaah" noises they usually reserve for babies and puppies. A coiffed dowager-type told me they made her want to dance; a Vietnamese man said that in his country hydrangeas were special. I love flowers, but I’d always thought Interflora’s "say it with flowers" slogan was really about levering money out of repressed males who couldn’t articulate their feelings. On that day, though, over the course of a few hundred yards, I realised that flowers can speak, and that what they say makes people happy.
Flowers are the most natural form of adornment. Nature’s jewellery, if you like. People have probably been plucking them and sticking them in their hair or behind an ear since, well, since people began. They show no signs of stopping. Flower-printed fabrics are ubiquitous in the clothing business, but I’m talking here about three-dimensional blooms. Last year, Lady Gaga wore a full-face helmet made of flowers. In 2007 Alexander McQueen showed his Sarabande dress, so embroidered with artificial and fresh flowers it looked like it needed a full-time gardener. Chanel has put tweed flowers on shoes, Prada suede ones. Lulu Guinness has made handbags that look like flower pots with a single large silken bloom on top. Flowers appear on hats and fascinators at weddings and the races, on flip-flops down at the beach and on hair-slides in kindergarten.
Now that artificial flowers have become so realistic, the attitude to them has changed and we’re less snobbishly resistant to them. Perhaps that’s one reason fake flowers now feature so much in what we wear. They still keep to their rightful seasons, though. The fashion industry has failed, despite repeated
efforts, to get us to wear even prints of flowers in winter. And they remain female territory: although Paul Smith has successfully appropriated floral prints for men’s shirts, you don’t often see men wearing real (or fake) flowers unless they’re on a catwalk or in morning dress. Even if they’re carrying a bunch on Valentine’s or Mother’s Day, they tend to have that self-conscious, these-are-for-someone-else look on their face.
by Rebecca Willis, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Illustration Bill Brown
How Science Plans to Help Us Live to 150 – and Soon
A few months ago my friend Steve announced his plan to live to 150.
Steve is no gerontologist – he sells data management software to corporate clients – but in his spare time he’s been reading up on longevity and blogging about what he’s learned. His goal is to make the most of what science has to offer to reach a record-breaking lifespan.
It’s ambitious, but not that far-fetched, he says. Just last week the oldest man ever, Jiroemon Kimura, died at 116. Given the pace of medical discovery maybe someone will get to 150 some day. Why not Steve?
It’s certainly easy to understand his motivation. Like me, Steve was born at the tail end of the baby boom. In a little more than 18 months, every last straggling member of that historic cohort will finally hit age 50. For our demographic, longevity is no longer an abstract concept. And just in case we’re not thinking about it enough, there’s an anti-aging industry doing all it can to cash in on our anxieties.
Into this carnival of hormone therapies and supplements comes an increasingly accessible test that promises to show just how well (or poorly) we’re holding up against the ravages of time.
It involves telomeres – which, if you haven’t had to think about this yet, are tiny structures at the ends of your chromosomes that keep them from fraying and losing crucial bits of genetic information. What interests researchers who study aging is that when cells divide, their telomeres get shorter. Once they get too short, cells stops dividing and may die. Played out across the whole body, there’s mounting evidence that shorter telomeres translate into increased susceptibility to diseases and the gradual wearing out of tissues that is the hallmark of old age.
It’s tempting to think of our telomeres as the cellular equivalents of the grim reaper’s hourglass, counting out our predetermined life spans. But the hourglass can get periodic refills – thanks to an enzyme called telomerase, which acts to build telomeres back up. And the rise of telomere testing for consumers is also pegged to evidence that telomere length is not just an inherited inevitability but may be influenced by factors such as stress, exercise and nutrition. The thinking is, if you can regularly monitor your telomere length, you’ll be more apt to do the right things to slow the rate at which they’re burning away.
“We all want to live healthier, longer,” says Calvin Harley, a telomere researcher and CEO of Telome Health, a company based in Menlo Park, Calif., that offers telomere testing to consumers. “Measuring telomere length and allowing individuals to see if their cellular age is more advanced than their chronological age may be a motivation to improve lifestyle.”
I can only hope.
As a working journalist in my late 40s I’ve hardly lived a life of serenity. Years of deadline pressures and lost sleep have surely taken their toll, along with with a general lack of exercise and too many late- night refrigerator raids. Now with three young children at home and all the usual pressures of midlife, I can easily imagine my telomeres burning up like so many sparklers.
Yet I’m also fascinated by the possibility that aging is more than just a collection of symptoms such as aching joints and greying hair. The idea that there is a mechanism that accounts for why our bodies run down is compelling. The idea that we can do something about it is hard to resist.
Into this carnival of hormone therapies and supplements comes an increasingly accessible test that promises to show just how well (or poorly) we’re holding up against the ravages of time.
It involves telomeres – which, if you haven’t had to think about this yet, are tiny structures at the ends of your chromosomes that keep them from fraying and losing crucial bits of genetic information. What interests researchers who study aging is that when cells divide, their telomeres get shorter. Once they get too short, cells stops dividing and may die. Played out across the whole body, there’s mounting evidence that shorter telomeres translate into increased susceptibility to diseases and the gradual wearing out of tissues that is the hallmark of old age.
It’s tempting to think of our telomeres as the cellular equivalents of the grim reaper’s hourglass, counting out our predetermined life spans. But the hourglass can get periodic refills – thanks to an enzyme called telomerase, which acts to build telomeres back up. And the rise of telomere testing for consumers is also pegged to evidence that telomere length is not just an inherited inevitability but may be influenced by factors such as stress, exercise and nutrition. The thinking is, if you can regularly monitor your telomere length, you’ll be more apt to do the right things to slow the rate at which they’re burning away.
“We all want to live healthier, longer,” says Calvin Harley, a telomere researcher and CEO of Telome Health, a company based in Menlo Park, Calif., that offers telomere testing to consumers. “Measuring telomere length and allowing individuals to see if their cellular age is more advanced than their chronological age may be a motivation to improve lifestyle.”
I can only hope.
As a working journalist in my late 40s I’ve hardly lived a life of serenity. Years of deadline pressures and lost sleep have surely taken their toll, along with with a general lack of exercise and too many late- night refrigerator raids. Now with three young children at home and all the usual pressures of midlife, I can easily imagine my telomeres burning up like so many sparklers.
Yet I’m also fascinated by the possibility that aging is more than just a collection of symptoms such as aching joints and greying hair. The idea that there is a mechanism that accounts for why our bodies run down is compelling. The idea that we can do something about it is hard to resist.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Why Tipping Should be Outlawed
It was the coat check tips that did it, back when I was working for a restaurant company and became friendly with a woman who staffed one of our hostess stations. It felt strange and demeaning to go from chatting about our weekend plans one minute to pressing a couple of sweaty bills into her hand in exchange for my coat the next. But to abstain would be even worse — it would mean neglecting my contribution to a pool of money that I knew comprised her income. I get the feeling she wasn't too keen on the power dynamics, either.
The friendships I've formed with restaurant employees over the years have made me think seriously about why hospitality workers are singled out among America's professionals to endure a pass-the-hat system of compensation. Why should a server's pay depend upon the generosity — not to mention dubious arithmetic skills — of people like me?
So I was thrilled to hear that New York City's Sushi Yasuda recently decided to eliminate tipping altogether. Including gratuity for parties of six or more has already become relatively commonplace; in a few restaurants, like Thomas Keller's Per Se and The French Laundry, it's automatically added onto all checks. But Yasuda has gone one step further, dispensing with service as a separate line item — and implicitly, an "extra" — and folding it into their prices as a cost of doing business, along with the rent, and electricity, and ingredients.
If I had my way, we'd take this idea to its logical conclusion and get rid of the practice of tipping altogether. Just outlaw it. Here’s why:
1. People don’t even understand what a tip is
If you are of the belief that a tip is an optional kindness you’re doing for your server, you might be surprised to hear that you are not in France. Here in America, the practice is voluntary only in the legal sense of the word. You are not technically stealing if you don't tip the customary 15 to 20 percent, but that’s probably the best that can be said of you. The tip you pay is a sort of wage: federal law allows tips to be used to make up the difference between a server's salary and minimum wage, meaning they can make as little as $2 to $3 per hour from their restaurant employer. Tips are absolutely depended upon to make up the shortfall.
When you leave a bad tip, you are docking a person's wages. This may either be because you're confused about what's expected or because you're an asshole, and you really believe that your sea bass arriving lukewarm is justly punishable by making it a little harder for the guy who brought it to you to pay his rent.
2. Doctors don’t live on tips. Nor do flight attendants.
Tip confusion is understandable, because it's not the way we choose to compensate most of our other people-facing professions. Imagine if when you went to the doctor, you decided how much he got paid based on how happy you were with the diagnosis; or if actors and musicians were paid discretionary sums by the audience, post-performance. Even within the context of the restaurant, some roles receive salaries and others rely on tips. Why do I tip the bartender who made my Manhattan, but not the line cook who grilled the excellent steak I'm eating with it? It’s completely arbitrary. Servers, whose job demands are not fundamentally different than that of hard-working office assistants, or hotel concierges, or spin instructors, or flight attendants, should be paid the competitive wage for what they do and how well they do it, and that cost should be factored into menu prices.
3. The percentage basis makes no sense
Did a server work less because I ordered a $40 bottle of wine than if I had ordered a $400 one? Should I feel a little bit bad when I'm a party of three on a table for four, as the waiter is getting stiffed on 25 percent of his or her optimal tip? Is it less hard to work at a roadside diner than Le Bernardin, where the check averages are approximately ten times higher? (Although that one isn't entirely fair; a place like Le Bernardin is dividing the tip among a much larger staff).
by Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn, Esquire | Read more:
Video: Reservoir Dogs
Porn Wars: the Debate that's Dividing Academia
When the Guardian announced the planned launch next year of Porn Studies – the world's first peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject – there were more than a few guffaws. "You can just see a future University Challenge," wrote one commenter online. "Carruthers, King's College Cambridge, reading pornography."
"It just sounds like a highbrow wank mag to me," wrote another. "One which I look forward to perusing." Even the headline had a touch of Vizmagazine's Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres about it, suggesting it was a "new discipline" for academics.
What it concealed, however, is a bitter and contentious academic war over the status and nature of porn research, a war that is almost as bitter and contentious as the status and nature of porn itself. (...)
According to some estimates, 30% of all internet bandwidth is used to transfer porn. Each month, porn sites get more visitors than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. And yet, says Attwood, in her own field, cultural studies, it's been mostly ignored. "Television, film, magazines have been studied from all sorts of angles. Something like the BBC has been investigated to death by historians, by people who analyse labour conditions, everything from accountancy to filming, but there's never been anything like that for porn.
"One of the reasons why I started thinking it would be a good idea to have a journal was meeting a French business studies academic at a conference who said, 'Oh, I've been thinking about porn in relation to business, but I can't tell any of my colleagues about what I'm doing. Where can I publish?'"
There are "tons of papers" out there, she says, though much of the current research "tends to do the same thing over and over again. It just asks the same questions. Is porn harmful? Is it linked to other things? Then it doesn't define what porn is and, if it finds the link, it doesn't really explain anything. There's a lot written and very little known."
Particularly among large swaths of the public. When I meet Attwood and Smith to talk about porn, I'm coming from a not exactly expert knowledge base. I talk later to Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham University, who has been working with the Campaign to End Violence Against Women, and she refers to a "generational" problem of awareness about porn. She's right about that. When I was a teenager the most explicit material I remember seeing was when I watched A Room With a View with a couple of friends and we paused it and rewound to watch Julian Sands emerging naked from a pond.
I know. Even to me, that feels like at least a century ago, possibly more. McGlynn says there's a profound difference between those who grew up before the internet and those who came later. "People who are my age, in their 40s, or even 30s, generally have no idea. Unless they're avid users of pornography, they just don't realise quite what's out there and how easy it is to watch. The technology has changed so rapidly even in the last few years. Most people think you have to hunt it out, or download it, or use a credit card. They don't realise it's freely available on all mainstream porn sites. Whereas young people do. All my students know exactly what's out there." (...)
"Porn is important to people on all kinds of levels, but, if you want people to be honest or to tell you things about their engagements with pornography, you have to be prepared to listen," she says. "I am politically motivated about the fact that people who look at porn are not all lizard people."
"It just sounds like a highbrow wank mag to me," wrote another. "One which I look forward to perusing." Even the headline had a touch of Vizmagazine's Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres about it, suggesting it was a "new discipline" for academics.What it concealed, however, is a bitter and contentious academic war over the status and nature of porn research, a war that is almost as bitter and contentious as the status and nature of porn itself. (...)
According to some estimates, 30% of all internet bandwidth is used to transfer porn. Each month, porn sites get more visitors than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. And yet, says Attwood, in her own field, cultural studies, it's been mostly ignored. "Television, film, magazines have been studied from all sorts of angles. Something like the BBC has been investigated to death by historians, by people who analyse labour conditions, everything from accountancy to filming, but there's never been anything like that for porn.
"One of the reasons why I started thinking it would be a good idea to have a journal was meeting a French business studies academic at a conference who said, 'Oh, I've been thinking about porn in relation to business, but I can't tell any of my colleagues about what I'm doing. Where can I publish?'"
There are "tons of papers" out there, she says, though much of the current research "tends to do the same thing over and over again. It just asks the same questions. Is porn harmful? Is it linked to other things? Then it doesn't define what porn is and, if it finds the link, it doesn't really explain anything. There's a lot written and very little known."
Particularly among large swaths of the public. When I meet Attwood and Smith to talk about porn, I'm coming from a not exactly expert knowledge base. I talk later to Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham University, who has been working with the Campaign to End Violence Against Women, and she refers to a "generational" problem of awareness about porn. She's right about that. When I was a teenager the most explicit material I remember seeing was when I watched A Room With a View with a couple of friends and we paused it and rewound to watch Julian Sands emerging naked from a pond.
I know. Even to me, that feels like at least a century ago, possibly more. McGlynn says there's a profound difference between those who grew up before the internet and those who came later. "People who are my age, in their 40s, or even 30s, generally have no idea. Unless they're avid users of pornography, they just don't realise quite what's out there and how easy it is to watch. The technology has changed so rapidly even in the last few years. Most people think you have to hunt it out, or download it, or use a credit card. They don't realise it's freely available on all mainstream porn sites. Whereas young people do. All my students know exactly what's out there." (...)
"Porn is important to people on all kinds of levels, but, if you want people to be honest or to tell you things about their engagements with pornography, you have to be prepared to listen," she says. "I am politically motivated about the fact that people who look at porn are not all lizard people."
by Carole Callwalladr, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Katherine Rose
There’s a Fly in My Tweets
Many important public health questions are difficult and costly to answer. What kind of risks do highly localized sources of pollution, like dry cleaners that use volatile chemicals, pose to the health of nearby residents? Are people with many friends healthier, or do those friendships increase the likelihood of infectious disease? Do frequent visits to public spaces like bars, gyms and restaurants affect a person’s health?
Researchers have been striving for generations to answer such questions, using health surveys of samples of individuals and computational studies of simulated populations. Now, however, the rise of social media and the burgeoning field of data science provide powerful tools to find high-precision, real-world answers with little cost or effort.
The millions of people posting to sites like Twitter and Facebook can be viewed as a vast organic sensor network, providing a real-time stream of data about the social, biological and physical worlds. While people use social media to build and maintain their social ties, the “data exhaust” of their postings can be analyzed to provide an enormous range of information at a population scale.
For example, my research group at the University of Rochester has analyzed Twitter postings from millions of cellphone users in New York City to develop a system to monitor food-poisoning outbreaks at restaurants.
We began by creating algorithms that can identify tweets about a given topic with near-perfect precision, even if the words and phrases used vary widely. The GPS information embedded in tweets sent from cellphones lets us integrate them with a variety of geographic databases.
We then feed the information into what we call the nEmesis system, whose development was led by our graduate student Adam Sadilek, now a researcher at Google. It begins by finding tweets that are sent from restaurants, which we can locate on Google Maps with 97 percent accuracy, thanks to GPS coordinates.
When a user is identified as having been at a restaurant, all of his or her tweets, from anywhere, are collected for the next 72 hours and analyzed to discover if any appear to report food poisoning symptoms, like vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever or chills.
Such reports are rare but significant. Over a four-month period, our system collected 3.8 million tweets, from which we were able to trace 23,000 restaurant visitors and found 480 reports of likely food poisoning. Restaurants were then scored by the number of food poisoning reports from their patrons.
The Twitter reports are not an exact indicator — any individual case could well be caused by factors unrelated to the restaurant meal. But in aggregate the numbers are revealing. Working with Vincent Silenzio, who teaches in the department of community and preventive medicine at our medical school, we compared the results with the current database of restaurant inspections conducted by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. We found significant correlation between restaurants’ violation scores and the Twitter-based scores.
Our project isn’t alone. While an army of corporations are busy data mining social media for marketing, a small but growing number of research groups have initiated similar efforts to leverage the torrent of online information for social good.
Researchers have been striving for generations to answer such questions, using health surveys of samples of individuals and computational studies of simulated populations. Now, however, the rise of social media and the burgeoning field of data science provide powerful tools to find high-precision, real-world answers with little cost or effort.
The millions of people posting to sites like Twitter and Facebook can be viewed as a vast organic sensor network, providing a real-time stream of data about the social, biological and physical worlds. While people use social media to build and maintain their social ties, the “data exhaust” of their postings can be analyzed to provide an enormous range of information at a population scale.For example, my research group at the University of Rochester has analyzed Twitter postings from millions of cellphone users in New York City to develop a system to monitor food-poisoning outbreaks at restaurants.
We began by creating algorithms that can identify tweets about a given topic with near-perfect precision, even if the words and phrases used vary widely. The GPS information embedded in tweets sent from cellphones lets us integrate them with a variety of geographic databases.
We then feed the information into what we call the nEmesis system, whose development was led by our graduate student Adam Sadilek, now a researcher at Google. It begins by finding tweets that are sent from restaurants, which we can locate on Google Maps with 97 percent accuracy, thanks to GPS coordinates.
When a user is identified as having been at a restaurant, all of his or her tweets, from anywhere, are collected for the next 72 hours and analyzed to discover if any appear to report food poisoning symptoms, like vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever or chills.
Such reports are rare but significant. Over a four-month period, our system collected 3.8 million tweets, from which we were able to trace 23,000 restaurant visitors and found 480 reports of likely food poisoning. Restaurants were then scored by the number of food poisoning reports from their patrons.
The Twitter reports are not an exact indicator — any individual case could well be caused by factors unrelated to the restaurant meal. But in aggregate the numbers are revealing. Working with Vincent Silenzio, who teaches in the department of community and preventive medicine at our medical school, we compared the results with the current database of restaurant inspections conducted by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. We found significant correlation between restaurants’ violation scores and the Twitter-based scores.
Our project isn’t alone. While an army of corporations are busy data mining social media for marketing, a small but growing number of research groups have initiated similar efforts to leverage the torrent of online information for social good.
by Henry Kautz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Olimpia Zagnoli
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)