Super Sunday, and the Crowd Goes, Um, Silent

Fans of the Seattle Seahawks collectively call themselves the 12th Man, an extra player with a noise level so pounding at their home stadium that seismologists have recorded minor earthquakes during big plays.

Fans of the Denver Broncos have a long reputation for noise that rattles visiting opponents, too, including a tradition of stamping their feet to create a rumbling called Rocky Mountain Thunder.

Both franchises used the high-decibel help of their hometown crowds to help win conference championship games Sunday. But when their teams meet in the Super Bowl on Feb. 2 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Seattle’s 12th Man and Denver’s Rocky Mountain Thunder will be mere echoes from distant time zones.

The Super Bowl is where the National Football League’s famed fan noise goes to die. What the hundreds of millions of viewers around the world may not realize, from the comfort of couches in front of big-screen televisions with the volume turned high, is just how strangely quiet it can be at a Super Bowl game.

“There’s not a lot of crowd noise,” said Ron Jaworski, an ESPN analyst who was the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles when they reached the Super Bowl at the end of the 1980 season. “People mostly sit on their hands, outside of the fans that buy the tickets for the team. It’s kind of a corporate get-together.” (...)

“It takes on the atmosphere of a game being played on a Hollywood soundstage,” the CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz said.

The broadcaster Al Michaels has covered eight Super Bowls. The loudest he can recall was Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Fla., where Pittsburgh fans far outnumbered those of the Arizona Cardinals as the Steelers won with a last-minute touchdown pass.

“Even then, you probably had half the fans there as neutral observers,” Michaels said. “I can’t think of a time where it would ever sound like it would sound in any other venue.”

He added: “If the game is not very good, there is nothing. It might as well be played out in a park.

by John Branch, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

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You Bought It, You Own It?

In the week leading up the two-year anniversary of the SOPA blackout protests, EFF and others are talking about key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day, we'll take on a different piece, exploring what’s at stake and and what we need to do to make sure the law promotes creativity and innovation. We've put together a page where you can read and endorse the principles yourself. Let's send a message to DC, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and wherever else folks are making new copyright rules: We're from the Internet, and we're here to help.

You bought it, you own it, right? Not always. Over the past decade, we have been quietly shifting to a world in which both digital goods (like mp3s, video files, and ebooks) and physical goods that contain software (like cars, microwaves, and phones) are never truly owned, but only rented.

Not to worry, say big copyright holders; people don’t want to be owners, because all they really care about is “access,” and more and more content is being made “accessible” in more and more ways. Sure, you might have to pay a premium for the “privilege” of, say, watching the movie you “bought” on more than one device, but no one’s forcing you to do it. Besides, they tell policymakers, just give us more tools to punish unauthorized uses and we promise to build more “authorized” channels – as long as users are willing to pay for them.

There are a lot of reasons they are wrong. Here's just a few:

First, most people have no idea that all they bought was a license. After all, the button they clicked on the Amazon site said "Buy," not "Rent." Little do they know that Amazon has the right to (for example) remotely delete books from their library, without notice, at Amazon’s whim. Or that the holiday special they were planning to see might suddently become "unavailable."

Second, many users don’t just want to “access” content, they want to comment on it and use it in new and different contexts. They want to view it or listen to it via devices and services that don't necessarily have the blessing of the copyright holder. They want to lend a book to a friend, or make a copy on the laptop they are bringing overseas, and they don’t think they should have to pay extra to exercise these basic consumer rights. They want to resell the music and books they are bored with, and use the money to buy new material. Some, like librarians, want to make copies in order to preserve, protect and share our cultural commons.

Third, any notion that “access” is enough cannot possibly make sense when copyright law is inserting itself into arenas beyond movies, books, and music, such as devices. From phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment, software is helping your stuff work better and smarter, with awesome new features. And that’s great . . . until it breaks and you want to fix it yourself (or take it to a local repair shop you trust). Or you think of a way to make it work even better that requires tinkering with the software (or some third party does). Or you want to give it to a friend, or re-sell it. Then, you have a problem. Why? Because the license agreementattached to the software in that device (often called an “End User License Agreement” or "Terms of Service") is likely to restrict your ability to tinker with your stuff. Typical clauses forbid reverse-engineering (i.e., figuring out how the software works so you can adapt it), transfer (i.e., giving it to a friend), and even using unauthorized repair sources at all.

Further complication: the software may come with digital locks (aka Digital Rights Management or DRM) supposedly designed to prevent unauthorized copying. And breaking those locks, even to do something simple and otherwise legal like tinkering with or fixing your own devices, could mean breaking the law, thanks to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And then there’s repair-manual lockdown, which happens when manufacturers refuse to publish crucial repair information (including the manuals themselves, but also things like diagnostic codes for cars)—and then threaten to sue anyone else who tries to do so with a lawsuit for copyright infringement.

The end result: fair uses are impeded, users are disempowered, trained to go hat in hand to the Apple store just to change a battery (rather than doing it themselves). Users are forced to make do with DRM-crippled devices that are fundamentally defective and compromiseour security. Medical clinics must waste scarce resources on expensive repair contracts rather than patient care. Independent repair shops are driven out of business. And the electronic waste piles up, as users discard their devices rather then fixing them or donating them for re-use.

In 2005, Make magazine published the Maker’s Bill of Rights, also known as the Owner’s Manifesto. As author Mr. Jalopy succinctly put it, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” These days, the question is not just whether you can open the hood – it’s whether opening the hood might land you in court.

Here’s the good news: there’s growing movement to defend your right to own your stuff – and to make sure ownership continues to mean something. Join us.

by Corynne McSherry, EFF |  Read more:
Image: EFF

Hotel California's Global Reach

Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—“Material Girl” and “Smooth Operator” and “Time After Time.” There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like “Country Roads” and “Hotel California,” and nobody seemed to think it strange that Filipinos should be singing, “Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore, West Virginia…” I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station.
—Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

Whenever I hear Neil Young sing about a “town in north Ontario” where there’s “memory to spare,” I’m transported back to a hillside in northern California in the early 1970s. I’m twelve and sitting with a friend the same age. We’re at summer camp and he’s teaching me the simple chord changes to “Helpless,” which is about to become the first song I can play on guitar.

Music does for me what biting into a madeleine did for that character in Proust’s novel: it sends me hurtling through time and space to a specific moment in the past. I’m sure this is true for many other people as well. And they, too, surely often end up in places far removed from the settings mentioned in the songs that set them in memory-fueled motion.

This is why, ever since reading Video Night in Kathmandu, with its wonderful evocation of mid-1980s Manila, where “music buzzed through the streets” from “dawn to midnight,” I’ve wanted to ask Pico Iyer a question: “When Don Henley begins crooning about a ‘dark desert highway’ in California, are you suddenly back in Manila and in your late twenties again?” (...)

What then of “Hotel California”? Whenever I hear Don Felder’s distinctive guitar opening now, I’m instantly in a New Delhi café in a supremely jet-lagged, disoriented state. I’d been in India less than 24 hours when that song from my teenage years in California became the first one I ever heard in India.

The mechanism of this musical memory must be somewhat different from the one that sends me to China whenever John Denver waxes nostalgic about the Shenandoah Valley. For while I had heard “Country Roads” plenty of times before going to Shanghai, I had never thought much about it, nor did I associate it with any special setting or moment. The Eagles, by contrast, were a group I listened to—and thought about—a lot while growing up in California, dreaming of a career as a singer-songwriter. And long before “Hotel California” began evoking an Indian café on my first visit to the country in 2010, it made me think of a very different time, place, and companion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, whenever I heard “Hotel California,” I would be transported back to an afternoon in the 1970s in the west LA home of close family friends, soon after the album Hotel California was released. The house was one I hung out at a lot in those days. I was close to two of the three brothers in the family, Danny and David.

In this moment, David keeps picking the needle up off the turntable and restarting the song after first twenty and then thirty and then forty seconds of it have played. He is determined, in a way that fascinates me because it seems to border on the obsessive, to figure out how to replicate exactly the song’s bass line. The intensity of his focus strikes me as special, because I can never get myself to work as hard as David on mastering a lick. (It isn’t until later that I realize he is equally bemused as a teenager by how long I can spend worrying over and reworking a lyric I’ve written, which already seems to work fine in terms of meter and rhyme.)

It took the strangeness of hearing the song right after arriving in India to break the memory hold of that west LA living room, but by the time that happened, I had already spent years thinking about the song’s peculiar global ubiquity. Seeing it mentioned in Video Nights in Katmandu was one thing that got me thinking about this topic, but so did noticing how often, from the mid-1990s on, I would hear the strains of the song at least once during my periodic return visits to China. I also began to notice how often I would see the song mentioned on Beijing-based blogs, often disparagingly.

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Boom | Read more:
Image: Video courtesy Boing Boing

Robert Doisneau - Atelier de Pierre Imans, 1945.
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Nerd Bowl

It's been called the "Nerd Bowl" because the teams hail from the hi-tech cities of San Francisco and Seattle. But – excepting perhaps for the cheerleaders – the clash on Sunday between the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks for a place in next month's Super Bowl will be a display of instinctual brutality.

Stoked by a rivalry dating back to the Gold Rush, the game is set to play out a more contemporary regional dispute: the Seahawks are owned by Paul Allen and draw support from Microsoft, the firm he co-founded, and the global shopping behemoth Amazon; the 49ers have established roots not only in San Francisco but increasingly in Silicon Valley, where Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter have their headquarters. (...)

"It's a neurotic rivalry because the cities are so similar," says Al Saracevic, sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. "They're both liberal cities on the west coast, coffee-obsessed, technology-obsessed and clearly football-obsessed."

The feud, say commentators, is not just play-acting for television. "I don't know anybody in here that likes anybody on the Seahawks. If you find one, let me know," insists San Francisco lineman Alex Boone.

The dislike, it seems, is mutual and the competitiveness between the teams and their fans has been exaggerated by a rivalry between their hard-headed coaches, Jim Harbaugh of the 49ers and Pete Carroll. "They're both good coaches and they've built arguably the best teams in the country," says Saracevic. "Now they're both looking at the Super Bowl – the biggest prize on the table."

But if technology rivalry means little to players on the field, it is more real in the two regions. Seattle prides itself on engineering skills and businesses that seek to establish relationships with their customers, dismissing Silicon Valley's recent tech contributions as social media software designed to gather users' data to sell to advertisers.

by Edward Helmore, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Reuters/USA Today Sports

How Japan Stood Up to Old Age

John Creighton Campbell, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, has devoted much of his career to studying responses to ageing in Japan. He takes issue with some fellow academics who associate what has become known as Japan’s “hyper-ageing” with inevitable economic catastrophe, even civilisational collapse. One virtue of the ageing “crisis”, he says, is that it happens slowly and predictably, giving governments, labour markets and society in general time to adjust. By around 2017, the number – though not the proportion – of over-65s will actually stabilise, he says, meaning the costs associated with ageing will tend to level off.

As far back as the early 1960s, the government became aware of the imminent ageing problem and began to establish nursing homes and home helpers. In the 1970s, benefits for retirees were more than doubled and a system of virtually free healthcare for older people was established. In 1990, Japan introduced the “Gold Plan”, expanding long-term care services. Ten years later, it started to worry about how to pay for it, and imposed mandatory insurance for long-term care. All those over 40 are obliged to contribute. The scheme’s finances are augmented with a 50 per cent contribution from taxes and recipients are charged a co-payment on a means-tested basis. Even then, there have been financing problems and the government has had to scale back the level of services provided. Still, Campbell calls it “one of the broadest and most generous schemes in the world”.

As a result of these and other adaptations, he argues, Japan has struck a reasonable balance between providing care and controlling costs. Other countries, including Britain, have studied Japan closely for possible lessons. Of course, 15 years of deflation have left Japan’s overall finances in lousy shape, with a public debt-to-output ratio of 240 per cent, the highest in the world. Spending on healthcare per capita, however, is among the lowest of advanced nations, though outcomes are among the best.

by David Pilling, FT |  Read more:

Image: Tohiski Senoue

Auguste Herbin (French, 1882-1960), Nature morte au melon, 1920-26.
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l’alia vojo (by La Stranga)
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Outsourcing Haiti

Across the country from Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, miles of decrepit pot-holed streets give way to a smooth roadway leading up to the gates of the Caracol Industrial Park, but no further. The fishing hamlet of Caracol, from which the park gets its name, lies around the bend down a bumpy dirt road. Four years after the earthquake that destroyed the country on January 12, 2010, the Caracol Industrial Park is the flagship reconstruction project of the international community in Haiti. Signs adorn nearby roads, mostly in English, declaring the region “Open for Business.” In a dusty field, hundreds of empty, brightly colored houses are under construction in neat rows. If all goes as hoped for by the enthusiastic backers of the industrial park, this area could be home to as many as 300,000 additional residents over the next decade.

The plan for the Caracol Industrial Park project actually predates the 2010 earthquake. In 2009, Oxford University economist Paul Collier released a U.N.–sponsored report outlining a vision for Haiti’s economic future; it encouraged garment manufacturing as the way forward, noting U.S. legislation that gave Haitian textiles duty-free access to the U.S. market as well as “labour costs that are fully competitive with China . . . [due to] its poverty and relatively unregulated labour market.”

The report, embraced by the U.N. and the U.S., left a mark on many of the post-earthquake planning documents. Among the biggest champions of the plan were the Clintons, who played a crucial role in attracting a global player to Haiti. While on an official trip to South Korea as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton brought company officials from one of the largest South Korean manufacturers to the U.S. embassy to sell them on the idea. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, having just appointed Bill Clinton U.N. special envoy to Haiti, tapped connections in his home country, South Korea.

Then suddenly, the earthquake presented an opportunity for the Clintons and the U.N. to fast track their plans. The U.S. government and its premiere aid agency, USAID, formed an ambitious plan to build thousands of new homes, create new industries, and provide new beginnings for those who lost everything in the earthquake. Originally the plan was to build the industrial park near Port-au-Prince. But land was readily available in the North, and the hundreds of small farmers who had to be moved from the park’s site were far less resistant than the wealthy land-owners in the capital. So the whole project moved to the Northern Department, to Caracol. Under the banner of decentralization and economic growth, the Caracol Industrial Park, with the Korean textile manufacturer Sae-A as its anchor tenant, became the face of Haiti’s reconstruction.

Now, only 750 homes have been built near Caracol, and the only major tenant remains Sae-A. New ports and infrastructure have been delayed and plagued by cost overruns. Concerns over labor rights and low wages have muted the celebration of the 2,500 new jobs created. For those who watched pledges from international donors roll in after the earthquake, reaching a total of $10 billion, rebuilding Haiti seemed realistic. But nearly four years later, there is very little to show for all of the aid money that has been spent. Representative Edward Royce (R-CA), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, bluntly commented in October that “while much has been promised, little has been effectively delivered.”

The story of how this came to pass involves more than the problems of reconstruction in a poor country. While bad governance, corruption, incompetent bureaucracy, power struggles, and waste contributed to the ineffective use of aid, what happened in Haiti has more to do with the damage caused by putting political priorities before the needs of those on the ground.

by Jake Johnston, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image Jake Johnston

Cooking Tako (Octopus)

 

Octopus Demystified

[ed. My nephew's recipe: massage tako (octopus) with Hawaiian salt for about 5 min. to de-slime and soften, remove webbing, boil in salt water for about 1/2 hr., or long enough to slide a fork gently into the tenticles. Optional: grill the cooked tako for a minute or two to give a crisp and slightly smoky exterior.]

Dr. V’s Magical Putter

Strange stories can find you at strange times. Like when you’re battling insomnia and looking for tips on your short game.

It was well past midnight sometime last spring and I was still awake despite my best efforts. I hadn’t asked for those few extra hours of bleary consciousness, but I did try to do something useful with them.

I play golf. Sometimes poorly, sometimes less so. Like all golfers, I spend far too much time thinking of ways to play less poorly more often. That was the silver lining to my sleeplessness — it gave me more time to scour YouTube for tips on how to play better. And it was then, during one of those restless nights, that I first encountered Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, known to friends as Dr. V.

She didn’t appear in the video. As I would later discover, it’s almost impossible to find a picture, let alone a moving image, of Dr. V on the Internet. Instead, I watched a clip of two men discussing the radical new idea she had brought to golf. Gary McCord did most of the talking. A tournament announcer for CBS with the mustache of a cartoon villain, McCord is one of the few golf figures recognizable to casual sports fans because he’s one of the few people who ever says anything interesting about the sport.

The video was shot in March of last year, when McCord was in California for an event on the Champions Tour, the 50-and-over circuit on which he occasionally plays. In it, he explained that he had helped Dr. V get access to the nearby putting green, where he said she was currently counseling a few players. She was an aeronautical physicist from MIT, he continued, and the woman who had “built that Yar putter with zero MOI.” The credentials were impressive, but the name “Yar” and the acronym were unfamiliar.

According to McCord, before building her putter Dr. V had gone back and reviewed all the patents associated with golf, eventually zeroing in on one filed in 1966 by Karsten Solheim. As the creator of Ping clubs, Solheim is the closest thing the game has to a lovable grandfather figure. He was an engineer at General Electric before becoming one of the world’s most famous club designers, and his greatest gift to the sport was his idea to shift the weight in a club’s face from the middle to its two poles. This innovation may sound simple, but at the time it was revolutionary enough to make Solheim one of the richest men in America and the inventor of one of the most copied club designs in history. In Dr. V’s estimation, however, Solheim was nothing but a hack. “The whole industry followed [that patent],” she told McCord. “You’re using pseudoscience from the ’50s in golf!”

As the video went on, McCord told the story of how he had arranged a meeting between Dr. V and an executive at TaylorMade, the most successful clubmaker in the world, whose products McCord also happened to endorse. The gist of that meeting: This previously unknown woman had marched up to one of the most powerful men in golf and told him that everything his company did was wrong. “She just hammered them on their designs,” McCord said. “Hammered them.”

I was only half-awake when I watched the clip, but even with a foggy brain I could grasp its significance. McCord is one of golf’s most candid talkers — his method of spiking the truth with a dash of humor famously cost him the chance to continue covering the Masters after the schoolmarms who run the tournament objected to his description of one green as so fast that it looked like it had been “bikini-waxed.” This respected figure was saying that this mysterious physicist had a valuable new idea. But the substance of that idea wasn’t yet clear — over time, I would come to find out that nothing about Dr. V was, and that discovery would eventually end in tragedy. That night, however, all I knew was that I wanted to know more.

by Caleb Hannan, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Photo: markk

Break

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[ed. I'll be on a short break and back soon (wi-fi willing). Enjoy the archives.]

Sergio Rodrigues
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Hiroshige (?) 1854.
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The Internet of Things Is Wildly Insecure — And Often Unpatchable

[ed. See also: How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet. It seems the future of cloud computing and the so-called Internet of Things is vulnerable not only to hacking and NSA snooping, but political fracturing that could Balkanize large portions of the internet.]

We’re at a crisis point now with regard to the security of embedded systems, where computing is embedded into the hardware itself — as with the Internet of Things. These embedded computers are riddled with vulnerabilities, and there’s no good way to patch them.

It’s not unlike what happened in the mid-1990s, when the insecurity of personal computers was reaching crisis levels. Software and operating systems were riddled with security vulnerabilities, and there was no good way to patch them. Companies were trying to keep vulnerabilities secret, and not releasing security updates quickly. And when updates were released, it was hard — if not impossible — to get users to install them. This has changed over the past twenty years, due to a combination of full disclosure — publishing vulnerabilities to force companies to issue patches quicker — and automatic updates: automating the process of installing updates on users’ computers. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re much better than ever before.

But this time the problem is much worse, because the world is different: All of these devices are connected to the Internet. The computers in our routers and modems are much more powerful than the PCs of the mid-1990s, and the Internet of Things will put computers into all sorts of consumer devices. The industries producing these devices are even less capable of fixing the problem than the PC and software industries were.

If we don’t solve this soon, we’re in for a security disaster as hackers figure out that it’s easier to hack routers than computers. At a recent Def Con, a researcher looked at thirty home routers and broke into half of them — including some of the most popular and common brands.

To understand the problem, you need to understand the embedded systems market.

by Bruce Schneirer, Wired |  Read more:

Image: alengo/Getty Images