Saturday, January 25, 2014
Twitter's Achilles' Heel
At some point, Twitter and the rest of social media became less about wanting to share the news and more about wanting to be the news.
Take Justin Bieber, for example.
As reports of the once-angelic and deeply troubled Canadian pop star’s arrest began to make its way around the web, reactions streamed onto Twitter, ranging from jokes to tongue clucks.
But by far, the most common refrain was something like this: “Why is this news??”
The simplest answer is that it wasn’t — at least not the most important news happening on that particular day. But Twitter isn’t really about the most important thing anymore — it stopped being about relevancy a long time ago. Twitter seems to have reached a turning point, a phase in which its contributors have stopped trying to make the service as useful as possible for the crowd, and are instead trying to distinguish themselves from one another. It’s less about drifting down the stream, absorbing what you can while you float, and more about trying to make the flashiest raft to float on, gathering fans and accolades as you go.
How did this happen?
A theory: The psychology of crowd dynamics may work differently on Twitter than it does on other social networks and systems. As a longtime user of the service with a sizable audience, I think the number of followers you have is often irrelevant. What does matter, however, is how many people notice you, either through retweets, favorites or the holy grail, a retweet by someone extremely well known, like a celebrity. That validation that your contribution is important, interesting or worthy is enough social proof to encourage repetition. Many times, that results in one-upmanship, straining to be the loudest or the most retweeted and referred to as the person who captured the splashiest event of the day in the pithiest way. (...)
It feels as if we’re all trying to be a cheeky guest on a late-night show, a reality show contestant or a toddler with a tiara on Twitter — delivering the performance of a lifetime, via a hot, rapid-fire string of commentary, GIFs or responses that help us stand out from the crowd. We’re sold on the idea that if we’re good enough, it could be our ticket to success, landing us a fleeting spot in a round-up on BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post, or at best, a writing gig. But more often than not, it translates to standing on a collective soapbox, elbowing each other for room, in the hopes of being credited with delivering the cleverest one-liner or reaction. Much of that ensues in hilarity. Perhaps an equal amount ensues in exhaustion.
by Jenna Wortham, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Take Justin Bieber, for example.As reports of the once-angelic and deeply troubled Canadian pop star’s arrest began to make its way around the web, reactions streamed onto Twitter, ranging from jokes to tongue clucks.
But by far, the most common refrain was something like this: “Why is this news??”
The simplest answer is that it wasn’t — at least not the most important news happening on that particular day. But Twitter isn’t really about the most important thing anymore — it stopped being about relevancy a long time ago. Twitter seems to have reached a turning point, a phase in which its contributors have stopped trying to make the service as useful as possible for the crowd, and are instead trying to distinguish themselves from one another. It’s less about drifting down the stream, absorbing what you can while you float, and more about trying to make the flashiest raft to float on, gathering fans and accolades as you go.
How did this happen?
A theory: The psychology of crowd dynamics may work differently on Twitter than it does on other social networks and systems. As a longtime user of the service with a sizable audience, I think the number of followers you have is often irrelevant. What does matter, however, is how many people notice you, either through retweets, favorites or the holy grail, a retweet by someone extremely well known, like a celebrity. That validation that your contribution is important, interesting or worthy is enough social proof to encourage repetition. Many times, that results in one-upmanship, straining to be the loudest or the most retweeted and referred to as the person who captured the splashiest event of the day in the pithiest way. (...)
It feels as if we’re all trying to be a cheeky guest on a late-night show, a reality show contestant or a toddler with a tiara on Twitter — delivering the performance of a lifetime, via a hot, rapid-fire string of commentary, GIFs or responses that help us stand out from the crowd. We’re sold on the idea that if we’re good enough, it could be our ticket to success, landing us a fleeting spot in a round-up on BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post, or at best, a writing gig. But more often than not, it translates to standing on a collective soapbox, elbowing each other for room, in the hopes of being credited with delivering the cleverest one-liner or reaction. Much of that ensues in hilarity. Perhaps an equal amount ensues in exhaustion.
by Jenna Wortham, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Out in the Great Alone
[ed. Missed this when it first came out, but with the Iditarod less than a couple months away it's a terrific read.]
“You’re not a pilot in Alaska,” Jay said, fixing me with a blue-eyed and somehow vaguely piratical stare, “until you’ve crashed an airplane. You go up in one of these stinkin’ tin cans in the Arctic? Sooner or later you’re gonna lose a motor, meet the wrong gust of wind, you name it. And OH BY THE WAY” (leaning in closer, stare magnifying in significance) “that doesn’t have to be the last word.” (...)
The plan was for me to spend a few nights in the apartment connected to the hangar — live with the planes, get the feel of them. I’d read that some Iditarod mushers slept with their dogs, to make themselves one with the pack. I needed flying lessons because the little Piper Super Cubs that would carry us to Nome were two-seaters, one in front, one behind. Jay wanted me prepared in case he had a fatal brain aneurysm (his words), or a heart attack (his words 10 seconds later), or keeled over of massive unspecified organ failure (“Hey, I’m gettin’ up there — but don’t worry!”) at 2,200 feet.
Choosing an airplane — that was the first step. Jay had four, and as the first ACTS client to arrive, I got first pick.
They were so small. Airplanes aren’t supposed to be so small. How can I tell you what it was like, standing there under the trillion-mile blue of the Alaska sky, ringed in by white mountains, resolving to take to the air in one of these winged lozenges? Each cockpit was exactly the size of a coffin. A desk fan could have blown the things off course. A desk fan on medium. Possibly without being plugged in.
“God love ’em,” Jay said. “Cubs are slower’n heck, they’ll get beat all to hell by the wind, and there’s not much under the hood. But bush pilots adore ’em, because you can mod ’em to death. And OH BY THE WAY … put ’em on skis and come winter, the suckers’ll land you anywhere.”
Two of the Cubs were painted bright yellow. I took an immediate liking to the one with longer windows in the back. Better visibility, I told myself, nodding. Jay said it had the smallest engine of any of the Cubs in our squadron. Less momentum when I go shearing into the treeline, I told myself, nodding.
The name painted in black on her yellow door read: NUGGET. She had a single propeller, which sat inquisitively on the end of her nose, like whiskers. Jay told me — I heard him as if from a great distance — that she’d had to be rebuilt not long ago, after being destroyed on a previous trip north. Was I hearing things, or did he say destroyed by polar bears?
I patted Nugget’s side. Her fuselage was made of stretched fabric. It flexed like a beach ball, disconcertingly.
Into the cockpit. Flight helmet strapped, restraints active. Mic check. Then Jay’s voice in my headset: “Are you ready!” It wasn’t exactly a question. (...)
We’d done some practice turns and picked out a lake; now all I had to do was get the plane on it. Jay explained to me about landing on snow, how the scatter of light tends to mask the true height of the ground. You can go kamikaze into the ice, thinking the earth is still 30 feet below you. To gauge your real altitude re: the whiteout, you have to use “references” — sticks poking through the snow, a line of trees on the bank. These supply you with vital cues, like “might want to ease down a touch” or “gracious, I’m about to fireball.”
I won’t bore you with the details of how to steer a Super Cub — where the stick was (imagine the porniest position possible; now go 6 inches pornier than that), how to bank, what the rudder pedals felt like. Suffice it to say that in theory, it was ridiculously simple. In practice …
“You have the aircraft.” Jay’s voice in my ear. “Just bring us down in a nice straight line.”
I felt the weight in my right hand as Jay released the stick. The lake was straight ahead, maybe three miles off, a white thumbnail in an evergreen-spammed distance. The plane was under my control.
Nugget — I’m not sure how to put this — began to sashay.
“Just a niiice straight line,” Jay reminded me. “And OH BY THE WAY … your pilot’s dead.” He slumped over in his seat.
Little lesson I picked up someplace: Once your pilot gives up the ghost, it is not so easy to see where you are headed from the backseat of a Super Cub. I mean at the “what direction is the plane even pointing right now” level. You will find that your deceased pilot, looming up against the windshield, blocks almost your entire forward view. To mitigate this, the savvy backseater will bank the wings one way while stepping on the opposite rudder pedal, causing the plane to twist 30 degrees or so to one side while continuing to travel in a straight line, like a runner sliding into base. That way, said enterprising backseater can see forward through the plane’s presumably non-corpse-occluded side window.
Yeah. Well. A thing about me as a pilot is that I do not, ever, want to see forward out of the side window. Especially not while plummeting toward a frozen lake. It’s like, bro, why create the hurricane. I figured that, as an alternative technique, I would just basically try to guess where we were going.
“How’s your speed?” my pilot’s (lifeless form) inquired.
The ground seemed to be making an actual screaming noise as it rushed up toward us. Hmm — maybe a little fast. I cut the throttle. Nugget kind of heaved and started falling at a different angle; more “straight down,” as the aeronautics manuals say. We were out over the lake. I had a sense of measureless whiteness lethally spread out below me. Either the landscape was baffled or I was. There were trees on the bank, but we were dropping too fast; I couldn’t relate them to anything. My references had gone sideways. At the last moment I pulled back on the stick.
There was a chiropractic skrrrk of skis entering snow. There was, simultaneously, a feeling of force transmitting itself upward into the plane. Nugget bounced, like a skipped stone, off the ice. We were tossed up and forward, maybe 15 feet into the air …
… and came down again, bounced again, came down again, and, unbelievably, slid to a stop.
“Guess what,” the reanimated form of my pilot said, popping up. “You just landed an airplane.” (...)
Anchorage, Alaska’s one real city. Fairbanks is a town, Juneau is an admin building with ideas. Anchorage is Tulsa, only poured into a little hollow in a celestially beautiful mountain range on the outer rim of the world.
When you’re there, it truly feels like you’re at the end of something. Like a last outpost. You’re in a coffee shop, you ordered cappuccino, you can see white mountains from the window, and on the other side of the mountains is wilderness that hasn’t changed since 1492.
That’s an exaggeration, but not as much of one as you might think.
by Brian Phillips, Grantland | Read more:
Images: Brian Phillips and Jeff Schultz/AlaskaStock
Choosing an airplane — that was the first step. Jay had four, and as the first ACTS client to arrive, I got first pick.
They were so small. Airplanes aren’t supposed to be so small. How can I tell you what it was like, standing there under the trillion-mile blue of the Alaska sky, ringed in by white mountains, resolving to take to the air in one of these winged lozenges? Each cockpit was exactly the size of a coffin. A desk fan could have blown the things off course. A desk fan on medium. Possibly without being plugged in.
“God love ’em,” Jay said. “Cubs are slower’n heck, they’ll get beat all to hell by the wind, and there’s not much under the hood. But bush pilots adore ’em, because you can mod ’em to death. And OH BY THE WAY … put ’em on skis and come winter, the suckers’ll land you anywhere.”Two of the Cubs were painted bright yellow. I took an immediate liking to the one with longer windows in the back. Better visibility, I told myself, nodding. Jay said it had the smallest engine of any of the Cubs in our squadron. Less momentum when I go shearing into the treeline, I told myself, nodding.
The name painted in black on her yellow door read: NUGGET. She had a single propeller, which sat inquisitively on the end of her nose, like whiskers. Jay told me — I heard him as if from a great distance — that she’d had to be rebuilt not long ago, after being destroyed on a previous trip north. Was I hearing things, or did he say destroyed by polar bears?
I patted Nugget’s side. Her fuselage was made of stretched fabric. It flexed like a beach ball, disconcertingly.
Into the cockpit. Flight helmet strapped, restraints active. Mic check. Then Jay’s voice in my headset: “Are you ready!” It wasn’t exactly a question. (...)
We’d done some practice turns and picked out a lake; now all I had to do was get the plane on it. Jay explained to me about landing on snow, how the scatter of light tends to mask the true height of the ground. You can go kamikaze into the ice, thinking the earth is still 30 feet below you. To gauge your real altitude re: the whiteout, you have to use “references” — sticks poking through the snow, a line of trees on the bank. These supply you with vital cues, like “might want to ease down a touch” or “gracious, I’m about to fireball.”
I won’t bore you with the details of how to steer a Super Cub — where the stick was (imagine the porniest position possible; now go 6 inches pornier than that), how to bank, what the rudder pedals felt like. Suffice it to say that in theory, it was ridiculously simple. In practice …
“You have the aircraft.” Jay’s voice in my ear. “Just bring us down in a nice straight line.”
I felt the weight in my right hand as Jay released the stick. The lake was straight ahead, maybe three miles off, a white thumbnail in an evergreen-spammed distance. The plane was under my control.
Nugget — I’m not sure how to put this — began to sashay.
“Just a niiice straight line,” Jay reminded me. “And OH BY THE WAY … your pilot’s dead.” He slumped over in his seat.
Little lesson I picked up someplace: Once your pilot gives up the ghost, it is not so easy to see where you are headed from the backseat of a Super Cub. I mean at the “what direction is the plane even pointing right now” level. You will find that your deceased pilot, looming up against the windshield, blocks almost your entire forward view. To mitigate this, the savvy backseater will bank the wings one way while stepping on the opposite rudder pedal, causing the plane to twist 30 degrees or so to one side while continuing to travel in a straight line, like a runner sliding into base. That way, said enterprising backseater can see forward through the plane’s presumably non-corpse-occluded side window.
Yeah. Well. A thing about me as a pilot is that I do not, ever, want to see forward out of the side window. Especially not while plummeting toward a frozen lake. It’s like, bro, why create the hurricane. I figured that, as an alternative technique, I would just basically try to guess where we were going.
“How’s your speed?” my pilot’s (lifeless form) inquired.
The ground seemed to be making an actual screaming noise as it rushed up toward us. Hmm — maybe a little fast. I cut the throttle. Nugget kind of heaved and started falling at a different angle; more “straight down,” as the aeronautics manuals say. We were out over the lake. I had a sense of measureless whiteness lethally spread out below me. Either the landscape was baffled or I was. There were trees on the bank, but we were dropping too fast; I couldn’t relate them to anything. My references had gone sideways. At the last moment I pulled back on the stick.
There was a chiropractic skrrrk of skis entering snow. There was, simultaneously, a feeling of force transmitting itself upward into the plane. Nugget bounced, like a skipped stone, off the ice. We were tossed up and forward, maybe 15 feet into the air …
… and came down again, bounced again, came down again, and, unbelievably, slid to a stop.
“Guess what,” the reanimated form of my pilot said, popping up. “You just landed an airplane.” (...)
Anchorage, Alaska’s one real city. Fairbanks is a town, Juneau is an admin building with ideas. Anchorage is Tulsa, only poured into a little hollow in a celestially beautiful mountain range on the outer rim of the world.
When you’re there, it truly feels like you’re at the end of something. Like a last outpost. You’re in a coffee shop, you ordered cappuccino, you can see white mountains from the window, and on the other side of the mountains is wilderness that hasn’t changed since 1492.
That’s an exaggeration, but not as much of one as you might think.
by Brian Phillips, Grantland | Read more:
Images: Brian Phillips and Jeff Schultz/AlaskaStock
Friday, January 24, 2014
Diamonds Are Forever
Diamonds are supposed to be a girl's best friend. Now, they might also be her mother, father or grandmother.
Swiss company Algordanza takes cremated human remains and — under high heat and pressure that mimic conditions deep within the Earth — compresses them into diamonds.
Rinaldo Willy, the company's founder and CEO, says he came up with the idea a decade ago. Since then, his customer base has expanded to 24 countries.
Each year, the remains of between 800 and 900 people enter the facility. About three months later, they exit as diamonds, to be kept in a box or turned into jewelry.
Most of the stones come out blue, Willy says, because the human body contains trace amounts of boron, an element that may be involved in bone formation. Occasionally, though, a diamond pops out white, yellow or close to black – Willy's not sure why. Regardless, he says, "every diamond from each person is slightly different. It's always a unique diamond."
Most of the orders Algordanza receives come from relatives of the recently deceased, though some people make arrangements for themselves to become diamonds once they've died. Willy says about 25 percent of his customers are from Japan.
Swiss company Algordanza takes cremated human remains and — under high heat and pressure that mimic conditions deep within the Earth — compresses them into diamonds.Rinaldo Willy, the company's founder and CEO, says he came up with the idea a decade ago. Since then, his customer base has expanded to 24 countries.
Each year, the remains of between 800 and 900 people enter the facility. About three months later, they exit as diamonds, to be kept in a box or turned into jewelry.
Most of the stones come out blue, Willy says, because the human body contains trace amounts of boron, an element that may be involved in bone formation. Occasionally, though, a diamond pops out white, yellow or close to black – Willy's not sure why. Regardless, he says, "every diamond from each person is slightly different. It's always a unique diamond."
Most of the orders Algordanza receives come from relatives of the recently deceased, though some people make arrangements for themselves to become diamonds once they've died. Willy says about 25 percent of his customers are from Japan.
At between $5,000 and $22,000, the process costs as much as some funerals. The process and machinery involved are about the same as in a lab that makes synthetic diamonds from other carbon materials.
by Rae Ellen Bichell, NPR | Read more:
Image: Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
by Rae Ellen Bichell, NPR | Read more:
Image: Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
What Jobs Will the Robots Take?
In the 19th century, new manufacturing technology replaced what was then skilled labor. Somebody writing about the future of innovation then might have said skilled labor is doomed. In the second half of the 20th century, however, software technology took the place of median-salaried office work, which economists like David Autor have called the "hollowing out" of the middle-skilled workforce.
The first wave showed that machines are better at assembling things. The second showed that machines are better at organization things. Now data analytics and self-driving cars suggest they might be better at pattern-recognition and driving. So what are we better at?
If you go back to the two graphs in this piece to locate the safest industries and jobs, they're dominated by managers, health-care workers, and a super-category that encompasses education, media, and community service. One conclusion to draw from this is that humans are, and will always be, superior at working with, and caring for, other humans. In this light, automation doesn't make the world worse. Far from it: It creates new opportunities for human ingenuity.
But robots are already creeping into diagnostics and surgeries. Schools are already experimenting with software that replaces teaching hours. The fact that some industries have been safe from automation for the last three decades doesn't guarantee that they'll be safe for the next one.
The first wave showed that machines are better at assembling things. The second showed that machines are better at organization things. Now data analytics and self-driving cars suggest they might be better at pattern-recognition and driving. So what are we better at?If you go back to the two graphs in this piece to locate the safest industries and jobs, they're dominated by managers, health-care workers, and a super-category that encompasses education, media, and community service. One conclusion to draw from this is that humans are, and will always be, superior at working with, and caring for, other humans. In this light, automation doesn't make the world worse. Far from it: It creates new opportunities for human ingenuity.
But robots are already creeping into diagnostics and surgeries. Schools are already experimenting with software that replaces teaching hours. The fact that some industries have been safe from automation for the last three decades doesn't guarantee that they'll be safe for the next one.
The Pleasure and Pain of Speed
Which seems safe enough, because psychologists have long estimated that it takes us humans at least a quarter of a second to do much of anything. William James, wondering more than a century ago what is “the minimum amount of duration which we can distinctly feel,” had it pegged around 50 milliseconds. James cited the seminal work of Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner, who observed that people shown sets of flashing sparks stopped being able to recognize them as distinct entities around 0.044 seconds. This “now” time increases as you go up the ladder of complexity.
To do more than barely register an image as a stimulus, to actually see something for what it is, the neuroscientist Christof Koch notes in The Quest for Consciousness, requires an average of a quarter of a second (when we are told what to look for, recognition drops to 150 milliseconds). Google’s target response time is just on Koch’s cusp of perceivable consciousness. From there, went the implication of Google’s report, lay a sloping temporal despond: More slow, less happy.
A quarter of a second, then, is a biological bright line limiting the speed at which we can experience life. And the life that we are creating for ourselves, with the help of technology, is rushing towards that line. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa catalogues the increases in speed in his recent book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. In absolute terms, the speed of human movement from the pre-modern period to now has increased by a factor of 100. The speed of communications (a revolution, Rosa points out, that came on the heels of transport) rose by a factor of 10 million in the 20th century. Data transmission has soared by a factor of around 10 billion.
As life has sped up, we humans have not, at least in our core functioning: Your reaction to stimuli is no faster than your great-grandfather’s. What is changing is the amount of things the world can bring to us, in our perpetual now. But is our ever-quickening life an uncontrolled juggernaut, driven by a self-reinforcing cycle of commerce and innovation, and forcing us to cope with a new social and psychological condition? Or is it, instead, a reflection of our intrinsic desire for speed, a transformation of the external world into the rapid-fire stream of events that is closest to the way our consciousness perceives reality to begin with? (...)
Referring to the theorist Walter Benjamin, Rosa argues that the greater the number of “lived events per unit of time,” the less likely it is these are to transform into “experiences.” Benjamin argued that we tried to capture these moments with physical souvenirs, including photographs, which could later be accessed in an attempt to reinvoke memories. Of course, this process has accelerated, and the physical souvenir is now as quaint as the physical photograph. In Instagram, we have even developed a kind of souvenir of the present: An endless photography of moments suggests that we do not trust that they will actually become moments, as if we were photographing not to know that the event happened, but that it is happening.
by Tom Vanderbilt, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Chad Hagen
Thursday, January 23, 2014
How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love
[ed. See also: What's Wrong with OKCupid's Matching Algorithm.]
McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match.com, J-Date, and e-Harmony, and he’d been searching in vain since his last breakup nine months earlier. He’d sent dozens of cutesy introductory messages to women touted as potential matches by OkCupid’s algorithms. Most were ignored; he’d gone on a total of six first dates.On that early morning in June 2012, his compiler crunching out machine code in one window, his forlorn dating profile sitting idle in the other, it dawned on him that he was doing it wrong. He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician.
OkCupid was founded by Harvard math majors in 2004, and it first caught daters’ attention because of its computational approach to matchmaking. Members answer droves of multiple-choice survey questions on everything from politics, religion, and family to love, sex, and smartphones.
On average, respondents select 350 questions from a pool of thousands—“Which of the following is most likely to draw you to a movie?” or “How important is religion/God in your life?” For each, the user records an answer, specifies which responses they’d find acceptable in a mate, and rates how important the question is to them on a five-point scale from “irrelevant” to “mandatory.” OkCupid’s matching engine uses that data to calculate a couple’s compatibility. The closer to 100 percent—mathematical soul mate—the better.
But mathematically, McKinlay’s compatibility with women in Los Angeles was abysmal. OkCupid’s algorithms use only the questions that both potential matches decide to answer, and the match questions McKinlay had chosen—more or less at random—had proven unpopular. When he scrolled through his matches, fewer than 100 women would appear above the 90 percent compatibility mark. And that was in a city containing some 2 million women (approximately 80,000 of them on OkCupid). On a site where compatibility equals visibility, he was practically a ghost.
He realized he’d have to boost that number. If, through statistical sampling, McKinlay could ascertain which questions mattered to the kind of women he liked, he could construct a new profile that honestly answered those questions and ignored the rest. He could match every woman in LA who might be right for him, and none that weren’t.
by Kevin Poulsen, Wired | Read more:
Image: Maurico Alejo
How Do Physicians Want to Die?
When you ask people how they’d like to die, most will say that they want to die quickly, painlessly, and peacefully… preferably in their sleep.
But, if you ask them whether they would want various types of interventions, were they on the cusp of death and already living a low-quality of life, they typically say “yes,” “yes,” and “can I have some more please.” Blood transfusions, feeding tubes, invasive testing, chemotherapy, dialysis, ventilation, and chest pumping CPR. Most people say “yes.”
But not physicians. Doctors, it turns out, overwhelmingly say “no.” The graph below shows the answers that physicians give when asked if they would want various interventions at the bitter end. The only intervention that doctors overwhelmingly want is pain medication. In no other case do even 20% of the physicians say “yes.”
What explains the difference between physician and non-physician responses to these types of questions. USC professor and family medicine doctor Ken Murray gives us a couple clues.
But, if you ask them whether they would want various types of interventions, were they on the cusp of death and already living a low-quality of life, they typically say “yes,” “yes,” and “can I have some more please.” Blood transfusions, feeding tubes, invasive testing, chemotherapy, dialysis, ventilation, and chest pumping CPR. Most people say “yes.”
But not physicians. Doctors, it turns out, overwhelmingly say “no.” The graph below shows the answers that physicians give when asked if they would want various interventions at the bitter end. The only intervention that doctors overwhelmingly want is pain medication. In no other case do even 20% of the physicians say “yes.”
What explains the difference between physician and non-physician responses to these types of questions. USC professor and family medicine doctor Ken Murray gives us a couple clues.
by Lisa Wade, Socialogical Images | Read more:
Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad
On a quiet night along the Tijuana border, you can almost hear them coming: the faint scraping of metal on dirt, falling clumps of earth, muted voices in the depths. At any given moment, there are men underground here, chipping their way toward the United States with antlike determination.
Many of the drug tunnels will be discovered and shut down before they're operational, but it doesn't matter; more will come. The economics are unassailable. A good tunnel can take nine months or more to build and cost up to $2 million, but if it can stay open for only a few hours, the cartels can move enough marijuana through it to satisfy entire time zones—making enough money to pay for twenty more tunnels. That is why they never stop coming, and why, on November 29, 2011, Special Agent Tony Armanza found himself lying in the bushes overlooking a nondescript warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa, waiting for signs that one of the tunnels was about to go live.
“It's getting dark out here, man. I'm starving,” he said into the radio. “What are we gonna do?” He and half a dozen other agents from the San Diego Tunnel Task Force had been watching the warehouse since 5 A.M.—an hour they sardonically called “the butt crack of dawn.” Armanza, face-first in the dirt all day, had been on countless stakeouts before and knew that the odds of the warehouse becoming active were diminishing with the sun; tunnel traffickers like to move their drug shipments during the day, when their trucks can blend in with the thousands of others coursing through the busy shipping district.
Half a mile away, Tim Durst, the supervisor of the task force, heard the exhaustion in Armanza's voice. Durst was well liked by his men; he knew that Armanza wasn't the only one tired. With a strong, goateed chin, an angular face, and closely cropped brown hair, Durst looks like a slightly weathered version of the G-man Keanu Reeves played in Point Break. He had been taking down tunnels on the mesa for five years, and today nearly one hundred agents and local cops were on call, all of them waiting for Durst's decision. “Five more minutes,” he told his team. Experience had taught him that successful operations sometimes hinged on ridiculously small windows of time and chance. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Armanza reported that a tractor-trailer had backed up to the warehouse's docking bay.
Armanza couldn't see inside the warehouse, but he knew what was going on: Men caked with dirt would be scrambling to load shrink-wrapped bales of marijuana—fresh from their passage through the tunnel—onto a truck as quickly as possible. Each bale would weigh some fifty pounds and would soon be tucked into a crate or cardboard box. One by one, they'd be lifted onto the semi. Hundreds of them.
An hour later, when the work was done, the truck's engine roared and the rig pulled away from the warehouse district, heading north toward the freeway. The agents could have stopped it immediately for an easy seizure, which would give them a search warrant to enter the warehouse and take the tunnel, but Durst's goal was strategic: He wanted not just to disrupt the operation but to deal a critical blow to the Sinaloa cartel. That meant following the truck and arresting as many players as possible. As the semi turned onto the freeway, teams of agents in unmarked vehicles followed, each car dropping off as another one picked up the tail, “passing the eye.” But after only thirty miles, the truck's driver pulled onto a side road, got out of the truck, and walked away.
“We're burned,” crackled an agent's voice over the radio. “He's abandoning the truck.”
This meant another decision for Durst: Should he order his men to move on the truck or wait and see if this was a handoff? He told everyone to wait through the night. At about 6 A.M., another car pulled up and dropped off a fresh driver, who got into the truck and resumed moving the load.
The new driver was cautious, trained to pick up tails. First he continued north, toward Los Angeles, then east, then west again. He finally pulled into a warehouse in the City of Industry, a dense industrial zone outside L.A., where he met with at least four other men. They powwowed for a few minutes; then the semi driver motored to yet another warehouse, where five vans were waiting. “It was gonna be like The Italian Job,” Durst would later say. “They were gonna load the dope into the vans and all leave and go in different directions.”
Durst wanted to wait once more and follow the vans. Where would they go? How many more nodes of the cartel's distribution ring could he take down? By now he had called forty-five men into the field. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Tailing five vans to God knew where would require more men and resources than he could readily muster. The whole operation was on the verge of becoming a crazy, unwieldy hydra. Durst had let the string unwind to the last manageable point; now there was only one option.
“Take it down,” he finally said.
As a veteran of an unwinnable war that has gone on for twenty-one years and turned the U.S.-Mexican border into Swiss cheese, he'd given that order many times before. But this bust would be unlike any other. In addition to the vans, there was the tunnel itself, which turned out to be a marvel of illegal engineering. The Mexican entrance, hidden in a two-story warehouse near the airport, had an elevator that popped up out of a tile floor. Its shaft descended thirty feet, to a staging area where bales could be loaded onto an electrically driven mining car. The railway traveled through the 550-yard tunnel atop wood planks. “It is clearly the most sophisticated tunnel we have ever found,” said Lauren Mack, the task-force spokesperson on-site at the time. The tunnel—along with many others—was believed to be the pet project of a single man. American law enforcement had been hunting him for years, but he had always managed to remain far enough removed from his creations that nobody could get to him. That is, until Durst let the string unwind—right to his doorstep.
Many of the drug tunnels will be discovered and shut down before they're operational, but it doesn't matter; more will come. The economics are unassailable. A good tunnel can take nine months or more to build and cost up to $2 million, but if it can stay open for only a few hours, the cartels can move enough marijuana through it to satisfy entire time zones—making enough money to pay for twenty more tunnels. That is why they never stop coming, and why, on November 29, 2011, Special Agent Tony Armanza found himself lying in the bushes overlooking a nondescript warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa, waiting for signs that one of the tunnels was about to go live.“It's getting dark out here, man. I'm starving,” he said into the radio. “What are we gonna do?” He and half a dozen other agents from the San Diego Tunnel Task Force had been watching the warehouse since 5 A.M.—an hour they sardonically called “the butt crack of dawn.” Armanza, face-first in the dirt all day, had been on countless stakeouts before and knew that the odds of the warehouse becoming active were diminishing with the sun; tunnel traffickers like to move their drug shipments during the day, when their trucks can blend in with the thousands of others coursing through the busy shipping district.
Half a mile away, Tim Durst, the supervisor of the task force, heard the exhaustion in Armanza's voice. Durst was well liked by his men; he knew that Armanza wasn't the only one tired. With a strong, goateed chin, an angular face, and closely cropped brown hair, Durst looks like a slightly weathered version of the G-man Keanu Reeves played in Point Break. He had been taking down tunnels on the mesa for five years, and today nearly one hundred agents and local cops were on call, all of them waiting for Durst's decision. “Five more minutes,” he told his team. Experience had taught him that successful operations sometimes hinged on ridiculously small windows of time and chance. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Armanza reported that a tractor-trailer had backed up to the warehouse's docking bay.
Armanza couldn't see inside the warehouse, but he knew what was going on: Men caked with dirt would be scrambling to load shrink-wrapped bales of marijuana—fresh from their passage through the tunnel—onto a truck as quickly as possible. Each bale would weigh some fifty pounds and would soon be tucked into a crate or cardboard box. One by one, they'd be lifted onto the semi. Hundreds of them.
An hour later, when the work was done, the truck's engine roared and the rig pulled away from the warehouse district, heading north toward the freeway. The agents could have stopped it immediately for an easy seizure, which would give them a search warrant to enter the warehouse and take the tunnel, but Durst's goal was strategic: He wanted not just to disrupt the operation but to deal a critical blow to the Sinaloa cartel. That meant following the truck and arresting as many players as possible. As the semi turned onto the freeway, teams of agents in unmarked vehicles followed, each car dropping off as another one picked up the tail, “passing the eye.” But after only thirty miles, the truck's driver pulled onto a side road, got out of the truck, and walked away.
“We're burned,” crackled an agent's voice over the radio. “He's abandoning the truck.”
This meant another decision for Durst: Should he order his men to move on the truck or wait and see if this was a handoff? He told everyone to wait through the night. At about 6 A.M., another car pulled up and dropped off a fresh driver, who got into the truck and resumed moving the load.
The new driver was cautious, trained to pick up tails. First he continued north, toward Los Angeles, then east, then west again. He finally pulled into a warehouse in the City of Industry, a dense industrial zone outside L.A., where he met with at least four other men. They powwowed for a few minutes; then the semi driver motored to yet another warehouse, where five vans were waiting. “It was gonna be like The Italian Job,” Durst would later say. “They were gonna load the dope into the vans and all leave and go in different directions.”
Durst wanted to wait once more and follow the vans. Where would they go? How many more nodes of the cartel's distribution ring could he take down? By now he had called forty-five men into the field. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Tailing five vans to God knew where would require more men and resources than he could readily muster. The whole operation was on the verge of becoming a crazy, unwieldy hydra. Durst had let the string unwind to the last manageable point; now there was only one option.
“Take it down,” he finally said.
As a veteran of an unwinnable war that has gone on for twenty-one years and turned the U.S.-Mexican border into Swiss cheese, he'd given that order many times before. But this bust would be unlike any other. In addition to the vans, there was the tunnel itself, which turned out to be a marvel of illegal engineering. The Mexican entrance, hidden in a two-story warehouse near the airport, had an elevator that popped up out of a tile floor. Its shaft descended thirty feet, to a staging area where bales could be loaded onto an electrically driven mining car. The railway traveled through the 550-yard tunnel atop wood planks. “It is clearly the most sophisticated tunnel we have ever found,” said Lauren Mack, the task-force spokesperson on-site at the time. The tunnel—along with many others—was believed to be the pet project of a single man. American law enforcement had been hunting him for years, but he had always managed to remain far enough removed from his creations that nobody could get to him. That is, until Durst let the string unwind—right to his doorstep.
Jason Kersten, GQ | Read more:
Image: Atilla Futaki
Monitors Your House’s Leaks on the Cheap
[ed. I suspect we'll see a virtual flood of these types of devices as the Internet of Things becomes more of a reality.]
Earlier this month, as Google was snatching up the smart-thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion, a lesser known home sensor company made its own announcement. SNUPI Technologies, a Seattle startup, said it had garnered $7.5 million in funding. That might be pocket change compared to the Nest deal, but it was a significant endorsement just ahead of SNUPI’s first product launch: a low-power wireless sensor network called WallyHome that tracks humidity, water leaks, and temperature throughout a building.There are already many home monitors on the market; some, such as Lowe’s Iris Home Management System and a water leak and flood sensor from General Electric, are even wirelessly networked. What makes WallyHome novel is its use of a low-power communication scheme that lets sensors send data back to an Internet-connected base station over significant distances and through obstructions like walls and floors while sipping power from a coin-cell battery.
SNUPI cofounder Gabe Cohn believes this long-distance, low-power approach will endear the product to homeowners who want a reliable sensor network that requires little maintenance and can be installed easily. The base station plugs into a wall outlet and an Internet router via an Ethernet cable. Six wireless sensors are placed in leak- or humidity-prone areas, such as behind a toilet, under a dishwasher, or near a sump pump. And each sensor’s battery should power the device for up to 10 years without a replacement, Cohn says.
by Kate Greene, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: striatic via Flickr Creative Commons
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Negotiating Conflicts, Part 1: Family Grudges
At the heart of many reader questions is this: “How do I get my family member(s) to do ‘X’ or stop doing ‘Y’?” Among the most painful of these cases (especially during the holidays) are family members who have curtailed or cut off contact. This week we take a look at how it happens that those we were closest to can have stories about us — and what has happened between us — that are so bewilderingly different from our own. And we have three strategies that just might let the healing begin. (...)
Few things are as emotionally upsetting as having a family member who has severed ties with you (or with the whole family). Most of us work especially hard not to cut off ties with family, precisely because they are family. And so when someone does, it is often experienced by those cut off as being cavalier, petty, or the result of a failure to try hard enough.
In short, he or she is holding a grudge. A grudge, by definition, is a thing that should notbe held. It’s not a legitimate or healthy reaction and the resulting choices are bad ones. A more stable person would not have taken offense in the first place and a bigger person would surely have let go of it by now.
But that’s not how it’s experienced by the people holding the grudge. They know that what they are doing is protecting themselves, drawing essential boundaries, doing the only thing left to them to do. When we cut ties with others it’s not because we don’t care; it’s because the friction or pain or dysfunction have finally overpowered even the special pull of family.
None of this tells us whether those who withdraw from families are right or wrong, justified or not. It only says that that their reasons make sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to us.
Why we have such different versions of history
Before thinking about what to do, it’s useful to understand a few reasons why people on each side of a conflict can experience it so differently.
1. Emotional math. Everyone gets frustrated, resentful, disappointed, or even enraged with others on occasion. It may come out as shouting, sarcasm, snippiness, or simply a put-upon silence. In those moments, we don’t see our emotional behavior as a big deal. They’re the ones who were being unusually annoying, it was a tense situation, you were tired. You know that your anger in that moment is not who you “really are.”
But to the other person, your anger is exactly who you are. Your emotional display is not incidental – it’s at the heart of the story they tell of what happened between you. From their point of view, your anger is the threat – the very thing they were coping with in that moment.
So you will tend to subtract your own emotions from the story, while the other person counts your emotions, say, double. And the same is true in reverse: You count their emotional reactions double, while they subtract them.
Few things are as emotionally upsetting as having a family member who has severed ties with you (or with the whole family). Most of us work especially hard not to cut off ties with family, precisely because they are family. And so when someone does, it is often experienced by those cut off as being cavalier, petty, or the result of a failure to try hard enough.In short, he or she is holding a grudge. A grudge, by definition, is a thing that should notbe held. It’s not a legitimate or healthy reaction and the resulting choices are bad ones. A more stable person would not have taken offense in the first place and a bigger person would surely have let go of it by now.
But that’s not how it’s experienced by the people holding the grudge. They know that what they are doing is protecting themselves, drawing essential boundaries, doing the only thing left to them to do. When we cut ties with others it’s not because we don’t care; it’s because the friction or pain or dysfunction have finally overpowered even the special pull of family.
None of this tells us whether those who withdraw from families are right or wrong, justified or not. It only says that that their reasons make sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to us.
Why we have such different versions of history
Before thinking about what to do, it’s useful to understand a few reasons why people on each side of a conflict can experience it so differently.
1. Emotional math. Everyone gets frustrated, resentful, disappointed, or even enraged with others on occasion. It may come out as shouting, sarcasm, snippiness, or simply a put-upon silence. In those moments, we don’t see our emotional behavior as a big deal. They’re the ones who were being unusually annoying, it was a tense situation, you were tired. You know that your anger in that moment is not who you “really are.”
But to the other person, your anger is exactly who you are. Your emotional display is not incidental – it’s at the heart of the story they tell of what happened between you. From their point of view, your anger is the threat – the very thing they were coping with in that moment.
So you will tend to subtract your own emotions from the story, while the other person counts your emotions, say, double. And the same is true in reverse: You count their emotional reactions double, while they subtract them.
by Sheila Heen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: NY Times
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