Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Planetary Boundaries
[ed. At least somebody's thinking about these things (pdf).]
— Swedish study on methodology
via:
Do You Believe in Sharing?
While delivering his Nobel lecture in 2007, Al Gore declared: “Today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer.”
It’s a powerful example of the way we tend to argue about the impact of the human race on the planet that supports us: statistical or scientific claims combined with a call to action. But the argument misses something important: if we are to act, then how? Who must do what, who will benefit and how will all this be agreed and policed?
To ask how people work together to deal with environmental problems is to ask one of the fundamental questions in social science: how do people work together at all? This is the story of two researchers who attacked the question in very different ways – and with very different results.
“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a seminal article about why some environmental problems are so hard to solve. It was published in the journal Science in 1968 and its influence was huge. Partly this was the zeitgeist: the late 1960s and early 1970s was an era of big environmental legislation and regulation in the US. Yet that cannot be the only reason that the “tragedy of the commons” has joined a very small group of concepts – such as the “prisoner’s dilemma” or the “selfish gene” – to have escaped from academia to take on a life of their own.
The credit must go to Garrett Hardin, the man who coined the phrase and wrote the article. Hardin was a respected ecologist but “The Tragedy of the Commons” wasn’t an ecological study. It wasn’t really a piece of original research at all.
“Nothing he wrote in there had not been said by fisheries economists,” says Daniel Cole, a professor at Indiana University and a scholar of Hardin’s research. The key idea, indeed, goes back to Aristotle. Hardin’s genius was in developing a powerful, succinct story with a memorable name.
The story goes as follows: imagine common pasture, land owned by everyone and no one, “open to all” for grazing livestock. Now consider the incentives faced by people bringing animals to feed. Each new cow brought to the pasture represents pure private profit for the individual herdsman in question. But the commons cannot sustain an infinite number of cows. At some stage it will be overgrazed and the ecosystem may fail. That risk is not borne by any individual, however, but by society as a whole.
With a little mathematical elaboration Hardin showed that these incentives led inescapably to ecological disaster and the collapse of the commons. The idea of a communally owned resource might be appealing but it was ultimately self-defeating.
It was in this context that Hardin deployed the word “tragedy”. He didn’t use it to suggest that this was sad. He meant that this was inevitable. Hardin, who argued that much of the natural sciences was grounded by limits – such as the speed of light or the force of gravity – quoted the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote that tragedy “resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things”.
Lin Ostrom never believed in “the remorseless working of things”. Born Elinor Awan in Los Angeles in 1933, by the time she first saw Garrett Hardin present his ideas she had already beaten the odds.
Lin was brought up in Depression-era poverty after her Jewish father left her Protestant mother. She was bullied at school – Beverly Hills High, of all places – because she was half-Jewish. She divorced her first husband, Charles Scott, after he discouraged her from pursuing an academic career, where she suffered discrimination for years. Initially steered away from mathematics at school, Lin was rejected by the economics programme at UCLA. She was only – finally – accepted on a PhD in political science after observing that UCLA’s political science department hadn’t admitted a woman for 40 years.
She persevered and secured her PhD after studying the management of fresh water in Los Angeles. In the first half of the 20th century, the city’s water supply had been blighted by competing demands to pump fresh water for drinking and farming. By the 1940s, however, the conflicting parties had begun to resolve their differences. In both her PhD, which she completed in 1965, and subsequent research, Lin showed that such outcomes often came from private individuals or local associations, who came up with their own rules and then lobbied the state to enforce them. In the case of the Los Angeles water producers, they drew up contracts to share their resources and the city’s water supply stabilised.
It was only when Lin saw Hardin lecture that she realised that she had been studying the tragedy of the commons all along. It was 1968, the year that the famous article was published. Garrett Hardin was 53, in the early stages of a career as a campaigning public intellectual that would last the rest of his life. Lin was 35, now Ostrom: she had married Vincent Ostrom, a respected political scientist closer to Hardin’s age, and together they had moved to Indiana University. Watching Hardin lecture galvanised her. But that wasn’t because she was convinced he was right. It was because she was convinced that he was wrong.
In his essay, Hardin explained that there was no way to manage communal property sustainably. The only solution was to obliterate the communal aspect. Either the commons could be nationalised and managed by the state – a Leviathan for the age of environmentalism – or the commons could be privatised, divided up into little parcels and handed out to individual farmers, who would then look after their own land responsibly. The theory behind all this is impeccable and, despite coming from a biologist, highly appealing to anyone with an economics training.
But Lin Ostrom could see that there must be something wrong with the logic. Her research on managing water in Los Angeles, watching hundreds of different actors hammer out their messy yet functional agreements, provided a powerful counter-example to Hardin. She knew of other examples, too, in which common resources had been managed sustainably without Hardin’s black-or-white solutions.
The problem with Hardin’s logic was the very first step: the assumption that communally owned land was a free-for-all. It wasn’t. The commons were owned by a community. They were managed by a community. These people were neighbours. They lived next door to each other. In many cases, they set their own rules and policed those rules.
This is not to deny the existence of the tragedy of the commons altogether. Hardin’s analysis looks prescient when applied to our habit of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or overfishing the oceans. But the existence of clear counter-examples should make us hesitate before accepting Hardin’s argument that tragedy is unstoppable. Lin Ostrom knew that there was nothing inevitable about the self-destruction of “common pool resources”, as economists call them. The tragedy of the commons wasn’t a tragedy at all. It was a problem – and problems have solutions.
If Garrett Hardin and Lin Ostrom had reached different conclusions about the commons, perhaps that was because their entire approaches to academic research were different. Hardin wanted to change the world; Ostrom merely wanted to describe it.
It’s a powerful example of the way we tend to argue about the impact of the human race on the planet that supports us: statistical or scientific claims combined with a call to action. But the argument misses something important: if we are to act, then how? Who must do what, who will benefit and how will all this be agreed and policed?
To ask how people work together to deal with environmental problems is to ask one of the fundamental questions in social science: how do people work together at all? This is the story of two researchers who attacked the question in very different ways – and with very different results.
“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a seminal article about why some environmental problems are so hard to solve. It was published in the journal Science in 1968 and its influence was huge. Partly this was the zeitgeist: the late 1960s and early 1970s was an era of big environmental legislation and regulation in the US. Yet that cannot be the only reason that the “tragedy of the commons” has joined a very small group of concepts – such as the “prisoner’s dilemma” or the “selfish gene” – to have escaped from academia to take on a life of their own.The credit must go to Garrett Hardin, the man who coined the phrase and wrote the article. Hardin was a respected ecologist but “The Tragedy of the Commons” wasn’t an ecological study. It wasn’t really a piece of original research at all.
“Nothing he wrote in there had not been said by fisheries economists,” says Daniel Cole, a professor at Indiana University and a scholar of Hardin’s research. The key idea, indeed, goes back to Aristotle. Hardin’s genius was in developing a powerful, succinct story with a memorable name.
The story goes as follows: imagine common pasture, land owned by everyone and no one, “open to all” for grazing livestock. Now consider the incentives faced by people bringing animals to feed. Each new cow brought to the pasture represents pure private profit for the individual herdsman in question. But the commons cannot sustain an infinite number of cows. At some stage it will be overgrazed and the ecosystem may fail. That risk is not borne by any individual, however, but by society as a whole.
With a little mathematical elaboration Hardin showed that these incentives led inescapably to ecological disaster and the collapse of the commons. The idea of a communally owned resource might be appealing but it was ultimately self-defeating.
It was in this context that Hardin deployed the word “tragedy”. He didn’t use it to suggest that this was sad. He meant that this was inevitable. Hardin, who argued that much of the natural sciences was grounded by limits – such as the speed of light or the force of gravity – quoted the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote that tragedy “resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things”.
Lin Ostrom never believed in “the remorseless working of things”. Born Elinor Awan in Los Angeles in 1933, by the time she first saw Garrett Hardin present his ideas she had already beaten the odds.
Lin was brought up in Depression-era poverty after her Jewish father left her Protestant mother. She was bullied at school – Beverly Hills High, of all places – because she was half-Jewish. She divorced her first husband, Charles Scott, after he discouraged her from pursuing an academic career, where she suffered discrimination for years. Initially steered away from mathematics at school, Lin was rejected by the economics programme at UCLA. She was only – finally – accepted on a PhD in political science after observing that UCLA’s political science department hadn’t admitted a woman for 40 years.She persevered and secured her PhD after studying the management of fresh water in Los Angeles. In the first half of the 20th century, the city’s water supply had been blighted by competing demands to pump fresh water for drinking and farming. By the 1940s, however, the conflicting parties had begun to resolve their differences. In both her PhD, which she completed in 1965, and subsequent research, Lin showed that such outcomes often came from private individuals or local associations, who came up with their own rules and then lobbied the state to enforce them. In the case of the Los Angeles water producers, they drew up contracts to share their resources and the city’s water supply stabilised.
It was only when Lin saw Hardin lecture that she realised that she had been studying the tragedy of the commons all along. It was 1968, the year that the famous article was published. Garrett Hardin was 53, in the early stages of a career as a campaigning public intellectual that would last the rest of his life. Lin was 35, now Ostrom: she had married Vincent Ostrom, a respected political scientist closer to Hardin’s age, and together they had moved to Indiana University. Watching Hardin lecture galvanised her. But that wasn’t because she was convinced he was right. It was because she was convinced that he was wrong.
In his essay, Hardin explained that there was no way to manage communal property sustainably. The only solution was to obliterate the communal aspect. Either the commons could be nationalised and managed by the state – a Leviathan for the age of environmentalism – or the commons could be privatised, divided up into little parcels and handed out to individual farmers, who would then look after their own land responsibly. The theory behind all this is impeccable and, despite coming from a biologist, highly appealing to anyone with an economics training.
But Lin Ostrom could see that there must be something wrong with the logic. Her research on managing water in Los Angeles, watching hundreds of different actors hammer out their messy yet functional agreements, provided a powerful counter-example to Hardin. She knew of other examples, too, in which common resources had been managed sustainably without Hardin’s black-or-white solutions.
The problem with Hardin’s logic was the very first step: the assumption that communally owned land was a free-for-all. It wasn’t. The commons were owned by a community. They were managed by a community. These people were neighbours. They lived next door to each other. In many cases, they set their own rules and policed those rules.
This is not to deny the existence of the tragedy of the commons altogether. Hardin’s analysis looks prescient when applied to our habit of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or overfishing the oceans. But the existence of clear counter-examples should make us hesitate before accepting Hardin’s argument that tragedy is unstoppable. Lin Ostrom knew that there was nothing inevitable about the self-destruction of “common pool resources”, as economists call them. The tragedy of the commons wasn’t a tragedy at all. It was a problem – and problems have solutions.
If Garrett Hardin and Lin Ostrom had reached different conclusions about the commons, perhaps that was because their entire approaches to academic research were different. Hardin wanted to change the world; Ostrom merely wanted to describe it.
The Liberal Dilemma
[ed. See also: Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2 with William R. Polk.]
I’m paid to have opinions, and I can’t figure out what my opinion is. On one hand, Bashar Assad is a mass murderer who, it seems plain, would be happy to kill half the population of his country if it would keep him in power. On the other hand, if he was taken out in a strike tomorrow the result would probably be a whole new civil war, this time not between the government and rebels but among competing rebel groups. On one hand, there’s value in enforcing international norms against certain kinds of despicable war crimes; on the other hand, Assad killed 100,000 Syrians quite adequately with guns and bombs before everybody got really mad about the 1,400 he killed with poison gas. On one hand, a round of missile strikes isn’t going to have much beyond a symbolic effect without changing the outcome of the civil war; on the other hand, the last thing we want is to get into another protracted engagement like Iraq.
In short, we’re confronted with nothing but bad options, and anyone who thinks there’s an unambiguously right course of action is a fool. So it’s a lot easier to talk about the politics.I honestly don't find this quite that difficult although I am sympathetic to the emotional need to "do something." For the second time today, I'll offer my maxim: "If it's not obvious that violence is the only answer then it's not the answer."
And in this case, it's actually pretty clear to me. Violence is being proposed as a symbolic gesture that virtually no one expects will change a thing for the Syrian people and which could make things worse. That's just not good enough.
by Digby, Hullabaloo | Read more:
The New Speed of Fashion
“What’s that?” I asked, looking at a spread of drawings on the wall of his studio-cum-workroom in London’s down-at-the-heels Dalston neighborhood. (Think: East Village.)
“Resort!” said the 28-year-old Northern Irishman whose label is known as J. W. Anderson.
Resort? Already! This guy has been in business only five years and has just 12 people in his studio. Does he really have to join the fashion treadmill, churning out more than four collections a year? A treadmill it is, as Alber Elbaz of Lanvin said with a sigh recently, before his men’s-wear show: he used to go on exploratory trips and hang out in downtown galleries, trawling for inspiration for his shows. But with the number of collections now doubled, there is no time to do much travel beyond the virtual kind.
If we accept that the pace of fashion today was part of the problem behind the decline of John Galliano, the demise of Alexander McQueen and the cause of other well-known rehab cleanups, nonstop shows seem a high price to pay for the endless “newness” demanded of fashion now.
The strain on both budgets and designers is heavy. And only the fat-cat corporations can really afford to put on two mega ready-to-wear shows a year, or four if you add two haute couture shows, or six if you count men’s wear. Resort and prefall push the number up to eight. A couple of promotional shows in Asia, Brazil, Dubai or Moscow can bring the count to 10.
Ten shows a year! If you knock off the holiday season and the summer break, that means a show nearly every month.
But who needs more fashion and is gagging for yet another show? And how can designers cope, given that even the prolific Picasso did not churn out work like factory-baked cookies?
For all the promotional excitement attached to the international collections, it is the resort or prefall lines that are on the shelves for close to six months, while the so-called main line is in and out in about eight brief weeks.
How to make sense of this endless rush for the new when there are no longer any simple markers, like seasons? During the summer, when you are looking for a breezy maxi dress, the fall wool coats are hanging on the rails. Come early November, they will have vanished in favor of resort, which used to be called cruise, as if everyone hopped on a boat to the Caribbean with the first autumn chill.
Who are the crazy ones? The buying public demanding fashion now!, clicking online to buy during Burberry’s live-stream runway show months before the clothes are produced for the stores? The online shoppers hitting on special delivery pieces from Net-a-Porter that no one else will have — at least for the next two weeks?
Or has fashion itself gone mad, gathering speed so ferociously that it seems as if the only true luxury today is the ability to buy new and exclusive clothes every microsecond?
by Suzy Menkes, NY Times | Read more:
Image: William Klein/Trunk Archive
Smartwatches: What are Apple, Samsung, Google and Microsoft Up To?
"For something to work here you have to convince people it's so incredible, that they want to wear it... If we had a room full of 10 to 20-year-olds and we said, 'Everyone stand up that has a watch,' I'm not sure anybody would stand up."
Nevertheless, Apple is one of the technology giants at the centre of growing speculation about smartwatches. Along with Samsung – whose Galaxy Gear is expected to be unveiled later this week – Google and Microsoft, the wrist is proving interesting for anyone who's anyone in the smartphone world.
Research firm Canalys recently claimed that 500,000 smartwatches will be sold this year, but then 5m in 2014 thanks to the entry of Apple, Samsung, Google and other technology firms into the market, alongside traditional watch-makers.
Rival IDC even thinks that demand for wearables (including watches) could slow down tablet sales over the coming years, reducing its forecasts accordingly. So what do we know – or, to be more accurate, what's been rumoured – about the plans of the big tech firms?
by Stuart Dredge, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Voucher Codes Pro
Is the Uncanny Valley Real?
Mick Walters opens a door in his lab and points his computer’s camera towards the small, blurry, tan-coloured object he has just revealed. "This is Kaspar Two," he says. As the Skype connection catches up, an image of a robot in a baseball hat, a blue button-down shirt and striped socks appears. Kaspar Two is a robot child. He's not even on, just sitting slumped over. Even though the image is somewhat fuzzy, Kaspar Two is able to give me that feeling, that nagging sense of unease. "I must admit," says Walters, "when I first actually built Kaspar, I did think he was a bit uncanny."
Kaspar has been created at University of Hertfordshire, UK to help children with autism understand how to read emotions and engage with other people, but it falls into what's often called “the uncanny valley”. From humanoid robot heads to super-realistic prosthetic hands, the uncanny valley is where robots that give us the creeps live. It is the range between obvious cartoons and discernibly real people, where things look almost lifelike, and yet not quite believable. Peering into the uncanny valley is an uncomfortable experience. Its residents, like Kaspar, have a way of eliciting feelings of disgust, fear or dread.
For almost 30 years, the concept of the uncanny valley has acted as a golden rule for roboticists and animators. From Pixar to puppets, creating characters that are too lifelike was thought to be the kiss of death for any project. But now the concept itself is coming under scrutiny like never before. What exactly we are feeling and why we feel this way are questions that have finally found their way under the microscope. And some researchers are asking whether the uncanny valley exists at all. (...)
The first time many people encountered the concept of the uncanny valley was in 2001 with the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Today, it is known as one of the first photorealistic computer animated films, but at the time not everyone was impressed. The groundbreaking graphics made many movie-goers uncomfortable, and the film flopped, losing Columbia Pictures $52 million. The faces were too human, too close to real life. "At first it's fun to watch the characters," film critic Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone. "But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements."
A link between what is almost human and what is creepy was proposed long before Final Fantasy, however. The phrase “uncanny valley” is widely accepted to have originated in 1970, with the publication of an academic paper by roboticist Masahiro Mori in an obscure journal called Energy. Mori's original paper was in Japanese. Contrary to popular belief, his original title “Bukimi No Tani” only roughly translates into the phrase it has made famous. A more accurate translation is “valley of eeriness”.
This matters because it demonstrates the problem with the uncanny valley: it is an inherently woolly idea. When researchers try to study the phenomenon, they often have a hard time pinning down what an uncanny response actually looks like. The main graph in Mori’s paper has been mistranslated many times, leaving many people unsure what he really meant. Mori used the Japanese word “shinwakan” on the y-axis, a word that has no direct translation into English. The most common interpretation is “likeability”, but not all translators agree about that. Other suggestions include “familiarity”, “affinity”, and “comfort level”.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the concept’s history, though, isn't the translation troubles, nor the debate over what is being represented on his graph, but how long it took for that debate to arise. Mori's paper didn't include any measurements. It was more an essay than a study. Yet, despite broad dissemination, the uncanny valley avoided scientific scrutiny until the early 2000's, when graphics and animatronics like Final Fantasy started giving people the creeps. As scientists started to explore Mori’s graph, they began to ask whether real data would reveal the same pattern.
Kaspar has been created at University of Hertfordshire, UK to help children with autism understand how to read emotions and engage with other people, but it falls into what's often called “the uncanny valley”. From humanoid robot heads to super-realistic prosthetic hands, the uncanny valley is where robots that give us the creeps live. It is the range between obvious cartoons and discernibly real people, where things look almost lifelike, and yet not quite believable. Peering into the uncanny valley is an uncomfortable experience. Its residents, like Kaspar, have a way of eliciting feelings of disgust, fear or dread.For almost 30 years, the concept of the uncanny valley has acted as a golden rule for roboticists and animators. From Pixar to puppets, creating characters that are too lifelike was thought to be the kiss of death for any project. But now the concept itself is coming under scrutiny like never before. What exactly we are feeling and why we feel this way are questions that have finally found their way under the microscope. And some researchers are asking whether the uncanny valley exists at all. (...)
The first time many people encountered the concept of the uncanny valley was in 2001 with the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Today, it is known as one of the first photorealistic computer animated films, but at the time not everyone was impressed. The groundbreaking graphics made many movie-goers uncomfortable, and the film flopped, losing Columbia Pictures $52 million. The faces were too human, too close to real life. "At first it's fun to watch the characters," film critic Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone. "But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements."
A link between what is almost human and what is creepy was proposed long before Final Fantasy, however. The phrase “uncanny valley” is widely accepted to have originated in 1970, with the publication of an academic paper by roboticist Masahiro Mori in an obscure journal called Energy. Mori's original paper was in Japanese. Contrary to popular belief, his original title “Bukimi No Tani” only roughly translates into the phrase it has made famous. A more accurate translation is “valley of eeriness”.
This matters because it demonstrates the problem with the uncanny valley: it is an inherently woolly idea. When researchers try to study the phenomenon, they often have a hard time pinning down what an uncanny response actually looks like. The main graph in Mori’s paper has been mistranslated many times, leaving many people unsure what he really meant. Mori used the Japanese word “shinwakan” on the y-axis, a word that has no direct translation into English. The most common interpretation is “likeability”, but not all translators agree about that. Other suggestions include “familiarity”, “affinity”, and “comfort level”.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the concept’s history, though, isn't the translation troubles, nor the debate over what is being represented on his graph, but how long it took for that debate to arise. Mori's paper didn't include any measurements. It was more an essay than a study. Yet, despite broad dissemination, the uncanny valley avoided scientific scrutiny until the early 2000's, when graphics and animatronics like Final Fantasy started giving people the creeps. As scientists started to explore Mori’s graph, they began to ask whether real data would reveal the same pattern.
by Rose Eveleth, BBC | Read more:
Image: Getty Images
Sundays
“Bonjour,” she says. She kisses his stiffened prick.
“He never smiles,” she says, looking it in the eye.
“Sometimes,” Dean murmurs. Her mouth feels warm. I try to find darkness, a void, but they are too luminous, the white sky behind them, their bodies open and fresh. They are too innocent. They're like my own children, and they illustrate an affection which has little reason to, which in fact does not exist except that she—at the very bottom it is her only real distinction—she knows how to make things come true. Her mouth moves in long, sweet reaches. Dean can feel himself beginning to tumble, to come apart, and I am like a saxophone player in a marching band—in love with a movie queen. Soft-eyed, lost, I am tramping wretchedly back and forth at halftime. My thoughts are flailing. The batons flash in mid-air. The whole stadium is filled. I am marching, turning, marking time while she slowly circles the field in a newconvertible. I am a clerk in her father's brokerage. I'm the young waiter who sends bouquets of flowers. I am a foreigner who answers the telephone wondering who can be calling, and it is the police. I cannot understand at first. They have to repeat it several times. There is an instant when my heart turns to lead: an accident. A motorcar...
“It's a Citroën,” Dean says. A motorbike is crushed beneath it. They pass slowly. Now they can see the feet of someone laid out near the trees. On the pavement are dark runs of blood.
“They're always in accidents,” he says. “I don't understand it.”
“They're very fast,” she tells him.
“Citroëns? They're not so fast.”
“Oh, yes.”
“How do you know? You don't even drive.”
“They always pass us,” she says.
I know this road well. It leads to les Settons, the lake where they go to swim. Anne-Marie stands in the shallow water. She has earrings on and a necklace. She bends her knees to immerse herself and then swims like a cat, her neck stiff, her head up. After a moment she stands up again.
“You must teach me,” she says to Dean.
He tries to show her the deadman's float. Breathe out through your mouth, he tells her. No. She doesn't like to wet her hair.
“You have to.”
“Why?”
“Come on,” he tells her. “You can't learn unless you do.”
She shrugs. A little puff of contempt—she doesn't care. Dean stands waist-deep in the water, waiting. She doesn't move. She is sullen as a young thief.
“Take your earrings off,” he says gently.
She removes them.
“Now do what I say. Don't be afraid. Put your face in the water.”
She doesn't move.
“Do you want to learn or don't you?”
“No,” she says.
“They're always in accidents,” he says. “I don't understand it.”
“They're very fast,” she tells him.
“Citroëns? They're not so fast.”
“Oh, yes.”
“How do you know? You don't even drive.”
“They always pass us,” she says.
I know this road well. It leads to les Settons, the lake where they go to swim. Anne-Marie stands in the shallow water. She has earrings on and a necklace. She bends her knees to immerse herself and then swims like a cat, her neck stiff, her head up. After a moment she stands up again.
“You must teach me,” she says to Dean.
He tries to show her the deadman's float. Breathe out through your mouth, he tells her. No. She doesn't like to wet her hair.
“You have to.”
“Why?”
“Come on,” he tells her. “You can't learn unless you do.”
She shrugs. A little puff of contempt—she doesn't care. Dean stands waist-deep in the water, waiting. She doesn't move. She is sullen as a young thief.
“Take your earrings off,” he says gently.
She removes them.
“Now do what I say. Don't be afraid. Put your face in the water.”
She doesn't move.
“Do you want to learn or don't you?”
“No,” she says.
Monday, September 2, 2013
I Forgot My Phone
Last weekend, I was watching television with a few friends, browsing the week’s most popular YouTube videos, when a piece in the comedy section called “I Forgot My Phone” caught my eye. As I was about to click play, however, a friend warned, “Oh, don’t watch that. I saw it yesterday, and it’s really sad.”
The two-minute video, which has been viewed more than 15 million times, begins with a couple in bed. The woman, played by the comedian and actress Charlene deGuzman, stares silently while her boyfriend pays no mind and checks his smartphone.
The subsequent scenes follow Ms. deGuzman through a day that is downright dystopian: people ignore her as they stare at their phones during lunch, at a concert, while bowling and at a birthday party. (Even the birthday boy is recording the party on his phone.) The clip ends with Ms. deGuzman back in bed with her boyfriend at the end of the day; he is still using his phone.
Ms. deGuzman’s video makes for some discomfiting viewing. It’s a direct hit on our smartphone-obsessed culture, needling us about our addiction to that little screen and suggesting that maybe life is just better led when it is lived rather than viewed. While the clip has funny scenes — a man proposing on a beach while trying to record the special moment on his phone — it is mostly … sad. (...)
In the late 1950s, televisions started to move into the kitchen from the living room, often wheeled up to the dinner table to join the family for supper. And then, TV at the dinner table suddenly became bad manners. Back to the living room the TV went.
“It never really caught on in most U.S. homes,” said Lynn Spigel, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Communication and author of the book, “Make Room for TV.” “At one point, a company even tried to invent a contraption called the TV Stove, which was both a TV and a stove,” she said.
So are smartphones having their TV-in-the-kitchen moment?
by Nick Bilton, NY Times | Read more:
Video: Charlene deGuzman
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Nine Questions About Syria
If you found the above sentence kind of confusing, or aren’t exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located, then this is the article for you. What’s happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.
Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: Syria and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.
1. What is Syria?
Syria is a country in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about the same size as Washington state with a population a little over three times as large – 22 million. Syria is very diverse, ethnically and religiously, but most Syrians are ethnic Arab and follow the Sunni branch of Islam. Civilization in Syria goes back thousands of years, but the country as it exists today is very young. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers in the 1920s.
Syria is in the middle of an extremely violent civil war. Fighting between government forces and rebels has killed more 100,000 and created 2 million refugees, half of them children.
2. Why are people in Syria killing each other?
The killing started in April 2011, when peaceful protests inspired by earlier revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia rose up to challenge the dictatorship running the country. The government responded — there is no getting around this — like monsters. First, security forces quietly killed activists. Then they started kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing activists and their family members, including a lot of children, dumping their mutilated bodies by the sides of roads. Then troops began simply opening fire on protests. Eventually, civilians started shooting back.
Fighting escalated from there until it was a civil war. Armed civilians organized into rebel groups. The army deployed across the country, shelling and bombing whole neighborhoods and towns, trying to terrorize people into submission. They’ve also allegedly used chemical weapons, which is a big deal for reasons I’ll address below. Volunteers from other countries joined the rebels, either because they wanted freedom and democracy for Syria or, more likely, because they are jihadists who hate Syria’s secular government. The rebels were gaining ground for a while and now it looks like Assad is coming back. There is no end in sight.
by Max Fisher, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Gene Thorp, Washington Post
Saturday, August 31, 2013
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