Pedrito Martinez Group

[ed. See also: Pushing Boundaries of Rhumba Fervor.]

Malika Favre Grass & Pool
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2 Americans, German-American Win Nobel in Medicine

[ed. Two Americans and a "German-American" won the Nobel Prize in medicine. Thanks, Yahoo!]

Two Americans and a German-American won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for illuminating how tiny bubbles inside cells shuttle key substances around like a vast and highly efficient fleet of vans, delivering the right cargo to the right place at the right time.

Sudhof, who was born in Germany but moved to the U.S. in 1983 and also has American citizenship [ed.], told the AP he received the call from the committee while driving in Spain, where he was due to give a talk.

[ed. And, in other news...]

Rothman said he lost grant money for the work recognized by the Nobel committee, but he will now reapply, hoping the prize will make a difference in receiving funding.

by Malcolm Ritter and Karl Ritter, AP |  Read more:
Image: AP Jannerik Henriksson

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A Watch That Sinks Under Its Features

In the beginning, computers were the size of buildings. To use one, you walked into it.

Over the decades, they grew small enough to sit on a desk, then to carry in a briefcase, then to keep in your pocket.

And now we’re entering the age of computers so small we wear them like jewelry.

Just what kind of jewelry, however, has yet to be decided. Will we wear our computers on our foreheads, as with Google Glass? Or will we wear them on our wrists, as with the new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch ($300)?

Samsung isn’t the first company to put a computer on your wrist. There have been a bunch of crude early efforts: the Pebble, the Cookoo, the Metawatch, the Martian. But the world waits for an Apple or Google or Samsung to do a more coherent job of packing a lot of components into a minuscule space.

Apple’s iWatch is only a rumor. But Samsung’s Galaxy Gear watch is here now. It’s ambitious, impressive, even amazing. But it won’t be adorning the wrists of the masses any time soon.

One big reason: It’s really only half a computer. It requires the assistance of a compatible Samsung phone or tablet; without one, the watch is pretty much worthless. And right now, only two gadgets are compatible: the Galaxy Note 3 (an enormous phone with the footprint of a box of movie-theater Raisinets) or Samsung’s new 10.1-inch Galaxy tablet.

By Thanksgiving, Samsung says, it hopes to make its popular Galaxy S4 phone compatible, too; after that, the older Note 2 and S3. But the Gear watch will never work with devices from rival companies; Samsung is trying to create an Apple-like ecosystem of Samsung gadgets that work smoothly — and exclusively — together.

The watch is huge, but it’s beautifully disguised to hide its hugeness. You can buy it with a plastic wristband in different colors. You can’t exchange the bands, though, because important elements are built into it: a micro-speakerphone in the clasp and a tiny camera lens in the band.

The Gear looks and feels fine on your wrist. It’s not waterproof, but Samsung says it can withstand little splashes. You charge its battery by clamping it into a tiny USB charger — every night.

So what does the Gear do? A hodgepodge of random things. Some work well, and some not. For example:

Tell the time: On your compatible Samsung phone, you install an app called Gear Manager. It’s the front end for the watch, like iTunes for an iPod. It’s how you change the watch’s settings and customize its features — and choose a watch face for its Home screen. (The watch’s sole button, on the side, always opens this Home screen.) You have a choice of various analog and digital displays.

Take pictures and videos: These aren’t what you’d call National Geographic quality. The photos are 1.9 megapixels and the watch holds only 50 of them. Videos are tiny and short (15 seconds long); you can’t shoot more than three in a row, and the watch holds only 15 of those. But let’s not quibble — it’s a watch.

But if you thought it was creepy that Google Glass lets your conversation partner film you without your knowledge, you ain’t worn nothing yet.

by David Pogue, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Great Depression from the Perspective of Today, and Today from the Perspective of the Great Depression

The past six years have seen an interesting dual shift in economics and economic history. Six years ago economists were a highly confident, aggressive, and arrogant bunch. We believed that we understood how modern market economies worked. We believed that we knew how to keep them running with both low and stable inflation and at fairly high levels of prosperity, relative to their technological productive potential.

It happened--as it had always happened whenever economics had thought that they had it figured out--we were wrong.

We were wrong, as we have discovered over the past six years as people attempted to do economic policy, that we had misjudged how to reliably keep economies running at a high level of prosperity. And we had misjudged how to reliably keep economies running at a high level of prosperity because we had misjudged what the Great Depression was. The fact that we had a faulty vision of the Great Depression was a cause of the policy errors and macroeconomic disaster of our day, and the fact that following the policy course that we did did not cure the problems of today has led us to revise our view of the Great Depression. Thus we were doubly wrong, but now--we hope--we have it right.

Our demonstrated wrongness means that a substantial amount of what economists like me were teaching, both about the structure of the economy today and about the Great Depression, was wrong. A consequence of the past six years is that we economists need to rip up a substantial part of our lecture notes--both the modern macro lectures on proper policy during business cycles, and also our economic history lectures about the Great Depression.

Six years ago we economists saw the Great Depression as something the Federal Reserve system could, should, and ought to have stopped dead in its tracks at its beginning. But, we would have said six years ago, the Federal Reserve did not understand the situation, and so it did not act properly. But, we would have said years ago, we today know better. Thus, we would have said six years ago, if anything even remotely Great Depression-like comes down the tracks, we can stop it did. You do not need to worry that we will once again, as in The Great Depression, find ourselves in an economy that is not just depressed but profoundly depressed, and depressed not for a year or two but for more than five--and perhaps more than ten.

That was the subtext of one of the large discussions carried on at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's August 2005 Jackson Hole Conference. Raghuram Rajan--who has just been named the governor of The Bank of India, India’s central bank--argued that recent changes in financial deregulation had created a situation in which there were too many many cowboys on Wall Street doing too many things and creating too many risks. The general response--from Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, from Arminio Fraga and Larry Summers, and from many many others, from practically everyone speaking to the group in the room save Alan Blinder--was: yes, there are cowboys, and the cowboys will lose money, but their actions will not cause any large-scale damage to the economy. Why not? Because we know well how to build firewalls between financial crises on Wall Street and the real economy of spending on currently-produced goods and services, production, and employment.

Because we know well how to build such firewalls, the near-consensus was, even if the systemically-important financial institutions have lost all control over their derivatives books and taken on immense risks they do not understand, there is no danger to the economy as a whole. Moreover, the argument was, there is value in letting the cowboys continue to do their thing. They might find some interesting business models. They will bear risk--and the world economy as a whole is short of risk-bearing capacity in normal times. Their willingness to bear risk might help accelerate technological progress: the dot-com bubble was a disaster for late-stage investors in venture capital and dot-com equities, but a boon for the rest of us as ten years' of experimentation and investment in high-tech was compressed into three.

Big mistake. Big misjudgment.

by Brad DeLong, Longform |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

George Booth, "Rehearsal’s Off!" and "Working on Plan B".
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Stevan Dohanos (1907 – 1994) Trailer Park Garden - Caravan Suburbia
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Capitol Hill
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Jimi Hendrix

Banksy
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Dolce and Gabbana F/W 2013 Menswear
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World War Z
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Ivan Peretz
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In Praise of Adultery

Marriage as a problem, and as a solution, has always been the central subject for drama, the novel and the cinema, just as it has been at the centre of our lives. Most of us have come from a marriage, and, probably, a divorce, of some sort. And the kind of questions that surround lengthy relationships – what is it to live with another person for a long time? What do we expect? What do we need? What do we want? What is the relation between safety and excitement, for each of us? – are the most important of our lives. Marriage brings together the most serious things: sex, love, children, betrayal, boredom, frustration, and property. (...)

Le Week-End concerns a late middle-aged couple, Nick and Meg, both teachers, who go to Paris to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. While there, they discuss the meaning and direction of their marriage now that their children have left home. Time and health are running out for them as they consider their impending old age and wonder what sort of future they might want, either together or apart. They think about how they might die; but this couple also need to talk about how they have lived: the way in which they have brought up their children, and how the family has worked, where it failed, and where there is regret, bitterness and even fury.

The film shows the depredations of time, but also the lability of the past, its different meaning and value for both parties, and how, now that the couple are talking, the past can seem as unstable as the future. They are looking in the same direction, but cannot see the same thing. There is no narrative they can agree on.

Their short sojourn, whatever else it is, will be a time of difficult conversations. What if it occurs to one or other of them that their relationship was a mistake, that it didn't resemble their original hopes at all, and that they could have had a far better life elsewhere? Meanwhile, what have they done to one another? Was there harm? What did they use one another for?  (...)

As Nick and Meg are aware, marriage frees a certain sort of companionable love, if you're lucky. But it domesticates sex. The couple are over-intimate. They know too much about one another. Without obstacles, there can be no fascination. How can you desire what you already have? That's not all: the arrangements that marriage requires to survive – security, duration, reliability, repetition – can seem liberating in their continuity, or stifling, according to your nature. The suburbs suited my father, since he'd come from a more dangerous place, and wanted contentment.

But there was something about living there that could make you want to scream. For some, it would never be sufficient. You might learn, as Nick does in Paris with his wife – whom he still wants and needs – that the problem with desire is not that you cannot get rid of it, but that there is too much of it. It is ever-present, and ever-pressing, however much you want to discount it. You cannot wish it away, and it cannot be replaced by a substitute.

by Hanif Kureishi, Guardian | Read more:

Image: Nicola Dove. h/t (this and following post) 3 Quarks

Your Body, Their Property

Polio ravaged much of the United States during the 20th century, leaving thousands sick, paralyzed, and dead. Those who were not afflicted with the virus were constantly haunted by the terror that their loved ones—particularly children, who were most vulnerable—would awaken one morning unable to walk and destined to a life of leg braces and iron lungs. That is until 1953, when Jonas Salk created a vaccine. There were more than 45,000 total cases of polio in the United States in each of the two years before the vaccine became broadly available. By 1962 there were only 910. Salk’s invention was one of the greatest successes in the history of American public health.

Amidst the adulation and fame that came with saving untold numbers of lives, Salk did something that seems curious if not unwise by today’s standards: he refused to patent the vaccine. During a 1955 interview, Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent, leading a seemingly bewildered Salk to respond, “The people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

These days, amid a patent-driven biotech boom, it is difficult to imagine a researcher making a similar appeal to the commons. But this sensibility received a crucial endorsement in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. The Court held that Myriad, a biotech firm in Utah, could not patent naturally occurring objects such as the two cancer-related human genes in question.

The decision upended many aspects of American intellectual property law that emerged in the wake of Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), when the Court held that living organisms—specifically, manmade crude–oil bacteria—are patentable subject matter. Chakrabarty inspired a rush to patent not just living things but also a growing array of biological materials, including human genes.

Fast-forward a few decades and almost one-fourth of all human genes had been patented and controlled by private hands. This made it expensive for scientists to do research implicating these genes or to develop tests that examine how certain mutations might affect health outcomes. Until Myriad the sensibility evoked by Salk—that entities beneficial to all humankind should not be patented and privatized—had largely been treated as a distant memory of a bygone era, like the jukebox or rotary telephone.

However, Justice Clarence Thomas eloquently set the record straight in his unanimous opinion for the Court in Myriad by contrasting the company’s patents to those upheld in Chakrabarty: “Myriad did not create anything. . . It found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.” Now, many existing human gene patents are in question.

It is rare that a legal dispute of this importance, technical complexity, and jurisprudential nuance is resolved by the Court with such clarity, conviction, and common sense. Yet even after Myriad, the dispute over who can claim property interests in human biological materials, and in what circumstances, is far from over. Human gene patents are not the only means by which corporations and researchers assert rights to parts of human bodies, and many more legal reforms are needed to ensure that your body remains entirely yours.

by Osagie K. Obasogie, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: James Butler

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Viktoria Kalaichi 
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Doc Watson