Monday, May 19, 2014
Beauty ≠ Truth
Einstein himself seemed rather indifferent to the experimental tests, however. The first came in 1919, when the British physicist Arthur Eddington observed the Sun’s gravity bending starlight during a solar eclipse. What if those results hadn’t agreed with the theory? (Some accuse Eddington of cherry-picking the figures anyway, but that’s another story.) ‘Then,’ said Einstein, ‘I would have been sorry for the dear Lord, for the theory is correct.’
That was Einstein all over. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr commented at the time, he was a little too fond of telling God what to do. But this wasn’t sheer arrogance, nor parental pride in his theory. The reason Einstein felt general relativity must be right is that it was toobeautiful a theory to be wrong.
This sort of talk both delights today’s physicists and makes them a little nervous. After all, isn’t experiment – nature itself – supposed to determine truth in science? What does beauty have to do with it? ‘Aesthetic judgments do not arbitrate scientific discourse,’ the string theorist Brian Greene reassures his readers in The Elegant Universe (1999), the most prominent work of physics exposition in recent years. ‘Ultimately, theories are judged by how they fare when faced with cold, hard, experimental facts.’ Einstein, Greene insists, didn’t mean to imply otherwise – he was just saying that beauty in a theory is a good guide, an indication that you are on the right track.
Einstein isn’t around to argue, of course, but I think he would have done. It was Einstein, after all, who said that ‘the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones’. And if he was simply defending theory against too hasty a deference to experiment, there would be plenty of reason to side with him – for who is to say that, in case of a discrepancy, it must be the theory and not the measurement that is in error? But that’s not really his point. Einstein seems to be asserting that beauty trumps experience come what may. (...)
We have to ask: what is this beauty they keep talking about?
by Philip Ball, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Karl Johaentges/Getty
What, Me Worry?
[ed. Also, not having a raison d'être - something (or someone) to give yourself to, or to live for... ]
The point at which chronic stress turns toxic is when it becomes unrelenting and traumatic, and when sufferers lack control and social support. "What we tend to mean when we talk about stress are the daily experiences of time scarcity, role uncertainty, social conflict and pressure," says Kelly McGonigal, PhD '04, a health psychologist, author and Stanford lecturer. "I've become even more convinced that the type of 'stress' that is toxic has more to do with social status, social isolation and social rejection. It's not just having a hard life that seems to be toxic, but it's some of the social poisons that can go along with stigma or poverty."
Stop Forcing People to Wear Bike Helmets
[ed. You should see the looks I get from the spandex-clad, florescent green, REI-helmeted geriatric crowd here in my community. Remember folks, you heard it here first (and second).]
And here's some advice that might help with that goal: Stop forcing people to wear bike helmets.For most bikers, this advice is anathema. The importance of wearing a helmet has been drilled into everyone since childhood. And, it's true that, as study after study has shown, you're better off with a helmet if you're in an accident.
But in the world's most popular biking cities, particularly in Europe, very few bikers wear helmets. And there are good reasons for that: biking, it turns out, isn't an especially dangerous form of transportation in terms of head trauma. And the benefits of helmets may be overstated. While they do protect your head during accidents, there's some evidence that helmets make it more likely you'll get in an accident in the first place.
Most importantly, requiring helmets deters many normal people from biking in the first place — in Australia, bike commuting rates plummeted when mandatory helmet laws went into effect. And, when there are fewer bikes on the road overall, biking becomes more dangerous.
Of course, if people want to wear helmets they are more than welcome to.
But we should think of helmets as an optional accessory, rather than an absolute requirement — and proposed laws that would mandate all cyclists wear helmets are a bad idea.
by Joseph Stromberg, Vox | Read more:
Image: John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Saving Privacy
[ed. Responses from: Evgeny Morozov, Jeremy K. Kessler, Jennifer Granick, Archon Fung, Richard M. Stallman, Bruce Schneier, Frank Pasquale, Rebecca MacKinnon, Marvin Ammori and Adam Kern.]
Since the rise of what was called Internet 2.0 about a decade ago, nearly all Americans have shared their beliefs, values, social and commercial proclivities, and patterns of behavior with a handful of Web-based companies. In return, the companies—most prominently, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Amazon—have shared with everyone and profited fantastically from user-generated content provided both consciously (such as emails or Instagram photos) and unwittingly (such as location information tracked via cell phones).
By pooling these data with the communications records it has been collecting since the spread of mobile phone networks two decades ago, the U.S. government has assembled the largest, if least visible, database in the world. It has given a million people security clearances. It has invested billions of dollars in software and hardware to analyze the data. It is constantly launching new code to comb the data for patterns that might reveal who is planning what terrible act against our country’s interests.
Few would deny the benefits of Internet 2.0 or mobile phones. And no one should begrudge the government’s official purpose. But information is power, and power corrupts. The effect may be insidious. Surveillance and pattern recognition can combine to convey an impression of knowledge so convincing that even the humblest of leaders may believe their data-driven judgments are infallible. The horrific threats we face today and the government’s apparent ability to know everything may seem to justify a broad range of actions, from prosecutorial (accusations, investigations, criminal charges) to punitive (drone strikes). The digital world moves so quickly that one might think it cannot accommodate the Constitution’s creaky eighteenth-century structures, which are designed to protect individuals—their privacy and personal liberty—from governmental power.
The fundamental question of politics remains unchanged: Who rules? Does the alliance of big business and big government to control big information constitute a new and necessary form of control over society? Or does the promise of democracy still hold—are individuals still sovereign? If the latter, then businesses would have to remember that the customer is king. Government would be of the people, by the people, and for the people. And technology would not jeopardize the rights of individuals. Instead it would re-establish the Bill of Rights in the digital world.
No individual can muster the spending power of the big firms, much less the government. However, computer scientists have recently invented new ways for people to act alone or together, in private, outside the purview of business or government. The desire of the state and firms to know everything is on a collision course with the possibility that individuals can now engage with each other, in anonymous confidence, as never before.
What is needed is nothing less than a digital bill of rights that reinterprets the original amendments for this century. This document, like the original, will have to be negotiated. My purpose is to outline the three principles that I think should guide the negotiation: (1) substantial reduction of the secrecy that shrouds the sharing of information between firms and the government and constraints against government misuses of personal data, (2) purposeful encouragement of the attempts by individuals, acting alone or together, to use new technologies that assure privacy, and (3) commitment to due process of law as the method for exercising state and business power over information.
by Reed Hundt, Boston Review | Read more:
Image:Andreas Herten
By pooling these data with the communications records it has been collecting since the spread of mobile phone networks two decades ago, the U.S. government has assembled the largest, if least visible, database in the world. It has given a million people security clearances. It has invested billions of dollars in software and hardware to analyze the data. It is constantly launching new code to comb the data for patterns that might reveal who is planning what terrible act against our country’s interests.
Few would deny the benefits of Internet 2.0 or mobile phones. And no one should begrudge the government’s official purpose. But information is power, and power corrupts. The effect may be insidious. Surveillance and pattern recognition can combine to convey an impression of knowledge so convincing that even the humblest of leaders may believe their data-driven judgments are infallible. The horrific threats we face today and the government’s apparent ability to know everything may seem to justify a broad range of actions, from prosecutorial (accusations, investigations, criminal charges) to punitive (drone strikes). The digital world moves so quickly that one might think it cannot accommodate the Constitution’s creaky eighteenth-century structures, which are designed to protect individuals—their privacy and personal liberty—from governmental power.
The fundamental question of politics remains unchanged: Who rules? Does the alliance of big business and big government to control big information constitute a new and necessary form of control over society? Or does the promise of democracy still hold—are individuals still sovereign? If the latter, then businesses would have to remember that the customer is king. Government would be of the people, by the people, and for the people. And technology would not jeopardize the rights of individuals. Instead it would re-establish the Bill of Rights in the digital world.
No individual can muster the spending power of the big firms, much less the government. However, computer scientists have recently invented new ways for people to act alone or together, in private, outside the purview of business or government. The desire of the state and firms to know everything is on a collision course with the possibility that individuals can now engage with each other, in anonymous confidence, as never before.
What is needed is nothing less than a digital bill of rights that reinterprets the original amendments for this century. This document, like the original, will have to be negotiated. My purpose is to outline the three principles that I think should guide the negotiation: (1) substantial reduction of the secrecy that shrouds the sharing of information between firms and the government and constraints against government misuses of personal data, (2) purposeful encouragement of the attempts by individuals, acting alone or together, to use new technologies that assure privacy, and (3) commitment to due process of law as the method for exercising state and business power over information.
by Reed Hundt, Boston Review | Read more:
Image:Andreas Herten
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Main Street, USA
Recently, while on a road trip across America, I stayed in a hotel haunted by the ghost of the Nobel-Prize-winning-author Sinclair Lewis. This was in the small town of Sauk Centre, Minn., in a four-story, turn-of-the century brick building called the Palmer House. Lewis, who grew up in Sauk Centre, worked at the Palmer House during his teens behind the cigar counter. The hotel’s website boasts that Lewis’s ghost has since been spotted throwing glasses in the lobby bar.
If you know anything about Sinclair Lewis, it isn’t difficult to picture him as a cursed, complaining specter. He had, by all accounts, a very unhappy time in Sauk Centre. Born Harry Sinclair Lewis to a stern and taciturn physician who didn’t relate to Lewis’s bookish, sensitive nature (“You boys will always be able to make a living,” Lewis’s father once told his other two sons, “But poor Harry, there’s nothing he can do.”) Lewis was a shy, strange, and often ridiculed little boy. His kind of fast-talking hyper-intelligence didn’t go over well in that farmland setting. He was derided by peers and elders alike for being “old-fashioned” and “queer.” It didn’t help that he was awkwardly tall, with bright red hair and acne all over his face. In 1901, he tried unsuccessfully to run away—hoping, he said, to join the Spanish-American War. He was 13.
In 1920, Lewis finally got his revenge on his hometown with the publication of his novel Main Street. By then he was a Yale graduate, married, and living in the rapidly-growing city of Washington, DC. The plot of the novel concerns a spirited, socially-minded young woman from St. Paul named Carol Kennicott, who is forced to move to a small Minnesotan town after marrying the town’s physician. She finds the place stifling and soul-crushing, the people gossip-prone and petty. Critics lauded the novel as a satirical send-up of provincial small-town life, and the book’s enormous success launched Lewis’s literary career. The book became so famous, in fact, that “Main Street” entered the cultural lexicon as a metonym for small-town life—one used to this day, though its meaning has shifted. Originally, the term was used pejoratively, denoting a backward, ignorant, isolated way of life. It wasn’t until the ’40s and ’50s, with the rise of small-town depictions in film and television, that the term began to accrue fond, nostalgic connotations.
At the time of the book’s publication, the citizens of Sauk Centre, recognizing themselves as real-life models for the novel’s more insipid characters, were enraged. The Sauk Centre Herald waited six months before mentioning the bestselling book. But gradually the town came to embrace Lewis’s novel. By the 1950s, Sauk Centre’s real-life Main Street had been recast as a tourist attraction.
Lewis published over 23 books and is best known today for Babbitt—another satirical novel that coined a new American phrase—but outside of the English classroom, his work has been largely forgotten. Meanwhile, suburban sprawl has all but done in the idea of a small town with a bustling city center. And yet, Sauk Centre still stands today, its Main Street largely intact. (...)
The Sinclair Lewis Interpretative Center sits on the corner of Main and 12th, across the street from a Snap Fitness Center and a Dairy Queen. The squat little building is flat-topped and brutalist, more like a military bunker than a literary museum. A motion sensor sounded like an alarm as I entered the antechamber, where a bronzed bust of Sinclair Lewis’s scowling head was poised on a plinth.
That Friday morning, I was the museum’s only visitor. The guestbook hadn’t been signed in weeks.
“...[O]ut of this setting emerged a man of such independent spirit that he not only started a new era in literature—he forced Americans to take a new, more critical look at themselves,” read one of the museum’s exhibits. “Because of him, America will never be the same again.”
“I mean, his books just aren’t all that exciting to modern readers,” Andrea Kerfeld, the executive director of the Sauk Centre Chamber of Commerce, whose office shares the same building as the museum, told me a while later. She winced a little with guilt. “Frankly we’d do a lot better with a Brett Favre Museum, something like that. But it’s what we’ve got.”
If you know anything about Sinclair Lewis, it isn’t difficult to picture him as a cursed, complaining specter. He had, by all accounts, a very unhappy time in Sauk Centre. Born Harry Sinclair Lewis to a stern and taciturn physician who didn’t relate to Lewis’s bookish, sensitive nature (“You boys will always be able to make a living,” Lewis’s father once told his other two sons, “But poor Harry, there’s nothing he can do.”) Lewis was a shy, strange, and often ridiculed little boy. His kind of fast-talking hyper-intelligence didn’t go over well in that farmland setting. He was derided by peers and elders alike for being “old-fashioned” and “queer.” It didn’t help that he was awkwardly tall, with bright red hair and acne all over his face. In 1901, he tried unsuccessfully to run away—hoping, he said, to join the Spanish-American War. He was 13.In 1920, Lewis finally got his revenge on his hometown with the publication of his novel Main Street. By then he was a Yale graduate, married, and living in the rapidly-growing city of Washington, DC. The plot of the novel concerns a spirited, socially-minded young woman from St. Paul named Carol Kennicott, who is forced to move to a small Minnesotan town after marrying the town’s physician. She finds the place stifling and soul-crushing, the people gossip-prone and petty. Critics lauded the novel as a satirical send-up of provincial small-town life, and the book’s enormous success launched Lewis’s literary career. The book became so famous, in fact, that “Main Street” entered the cultural lexicon as a metonym for small-town life—one used to this day, though its meaning has shifted. Originally, the term was used pejoratively, denoting a backward, ignorant, isolated way of life. It wasn’t until the ’40s and ’50s, with the rise of small-town depictions in film and television, that the term began to accrue fond, nostalgic connotations.
At the time of the book’s publication, the citizens of Sauk Centre, recognizing themselves as real-life models for the novel’s more insipid characters, were enraged. The Sauk Centre Herald waited six months before mentioning the bestselling book. But gradually the town came to embrace Lewis’s novel. By the 1950s, Sauk Centre’s real-life Main Street had been recast as a tourist attraction.
Lewis published over 23 books and is best known today for Babbitt—another satirical novel that coined a new American phrase—but outside of the English classroom, his work has been largely forgotten. Meanwhile, suburban sprawl has all but done in the idea of a small town with a bustling city center. And yet, Sauk Centre still stands today, its Main Street largely intact. (...)
The Sinclair Lewis Interpretative Center sits on the corner of Main and 12th, across the street from a Snap Fitness Center and a Dairy Queen. The squat little building is flat-topped and brutalist, more like a military bunker than a literary museum. A motion sensor sounded like an alarm as I entered the antechamber, where a bronzed bust of Sinclair Lewis’s scowling head was poised on a plinth.
That Friday morning, I was the museum’s only visitor. The guestbook hadn’t been signed in weeks.
“...[O]ut of this setting emerged a man of such independent spirit that he not only started a new era in literature—he forced Americans to take a new, more critical look at themselves,” read one of the museum’s exhibits. “Because of him, America will never be the same again.”
“I mean, his books just aren’t all that exciting to modern readers,” Andrea Kerfeld, the executive director of the Sauk Centre Chamber of Commerce, whose office shares the same building as the museum, told me a while later. She winced a little with guilt. “Frankly we’d do a lot better with a Brett Favre Museum, something like that. But it’s what we’ve got.”
by Matt Ray Robinson, TMN | Read more:
Image Matt Ray Robinson
Saturday, May 17, 2014
The Library of Congress Wants to Destroy Your Old CDs (For Science)
If you've tried listening to any of your old CDs lately, if you even own them anymore, you may have noticed they won't play. That's what happened to mine, anyway.
CD players have long since given up on most of the burned mixes I made in college. (In some cases, this is for the best.) And while most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection—so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994—isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.
"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time," said Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. "They were really more developed for mass production.""If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer."
France and her colleagues are trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. This is a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years but won't say how. And so: we know a CD's basic composition—there's a plastic polycarbonate layer, a metal reflective layer with all the data in it, and then the coating on top—but it's impossible to tell just from looking at a disc how it will age. (...)
There are all kinds of forces that accelerate CD aging in real time. Eventually, many discs show signs of edge rot, which happens as oxygen seeps through a disc's layers. Some CDs begin a deterioration process called bronzing, which is corrosion that worsens with exposure to various pollutants. The lasers in devices used to burn or even play a CD can also affect its longevity.
Then there's the wear and tear that's more in line with what you'd probably expect to happen over time—like scratches and exposure to extreme temperatures. ("If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer. That's a really great way to destroy them," France says.)
But it turns out that plenty of people don't know how to care for CDs properly in the first place. For instance, the best way to hold a CD is to pinch the hole in the middle, and the top surface of the CD—the side that faces up when it's playing—is more delicate than the bottom. Again, France: "People are generally more concerned about the scratches on the bottom, but actually you can get quite a lot more damage when you get scratches on the top layer because it goes through and impacts the metal reflective layer. So quite often you find people are really careful not to put their hands underneath, but holding it in the middle is better."
It's also better not to muck up the top of your CDs with labels—the adhesive creates chemical reactions that quickly eat up data—or even permanent markers. "The moment you start to write on that top layer, you're setting yourself up for degradation," France said.
by Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Adrienne LaFrance
CD players have long since given up on most of the burned mixes I made in college. (In some cases, this is for the best.) And while most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection—so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994—isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.
"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time," said Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. "They were really more developed for mass production.""If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer."France and her colleagues are trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. This is a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years but won't say how. And so: we know a CD's basic composition—there's a plastic polycarbonate layer, a metal reflective layer with all the data in it, and then the coating on top—but it's impossible to tell just from looking at a disc how it will age. (...)
There are all kinds of forces that accelerate CD aging in real time. Eventually, many discs show signs of edge rot, which happens as oxygen seeps through a disc's layers. Some CDs begin a deterioration process called bronzing, which is corrosion that worsens with exposure to various pollutants. The lasers in devices used to burn or even play a CD can also affect its longevity.
Then there's the wear and tear that's more in line with what you'd probably expect to happen over time—like scratches and exposure to extreme temperatures. ("If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer. That's a really great way to destroy them," France says.)
But it turns out that plenty of people don't know how to care for CDs properly in the first place. For instance, the best way to hold a CD is to pinch the hole in the middle, and the top surface of the CD—the side that faces up when it's playing—is more delicate than the bottom. Again, France: "People are generally more concerned about the scratches on the bottom, but actually you can get quite a lot more damage when you get scratches on the top layer because it goes through and impacts the metal reflective layer. So quite often you find people are really careful not to put their hands underneath, but holding it in the middle is better."
It's also better not to muck up the top of your CDs with labels—the adhesive creates chemical reactions that quickly eat up data—or even permanent markers. "The moment you start to write on that top layer, you're setting yourself up for degradation," France said.
by Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Adrienne LaFrance
Lawyer Responds to Porn Star's Threatened Lawsuit
Millionaire playboy and Instagram celebrity Dan Bilzerian is best known of late for chucking a 90-pound porn star, Janice Griffith, off his mansion roof during a shoot for Hustler, and missing the pool. Griffith threatened to sue, and now Bilzerian's lawyer has purportedly writtenthe snarkiest response Bilzerian's money could buy.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Inside the Strange New World of DIY Brain Stimulation
When Brent Williams got to RadioShack that day in the spring of 2012, he knew exactly what he was looking for: a variable resistor, a current regulator, a circuit board, and a 9-volt battery. The total came to around $20. Williams is tall and balding, with wire-rim glasses that make him look like an engineer, which he is. He directs a center on technology in education at Kennesaw State University and is the kind of guy who spends his free time chatting up people on his ham radio or trying to glimpse a passing comet with his telescope. But this project was different.
When he got home, he took his supplies into his office. He heated up his soldering iron, hoping his wife wouldn’t see what he was up to. He fished a few wires out of his desk and built a simple circuit. Using alligator clips, he connected the circuit to two kitchen sponges soaked in saline and strapped them to his head with a sweatband. He positioned one sponge just above his right eyebrow and the other up high on the left side of his forehead. Then he snapped the battery into place, turned a small dial, and sent an electric current into his brain.
It’s been nearly two years since Williams cobbled together his first device, and he has been electrifying his brain two to three times a week ever since. Often he does it for about 25 minutes in the evening while reading on the couch. Sometimes it’s while he’s doing laundry or other chores. It’s become just another part of his routine, like brushing his teeth.
Williams got the idea from a news story about how Air Force researchers were studying whether brain stimulation could cut pilot training time. The military is not alone in thinking that brain zapping may improve mental function. In recent years, the method—technically known as transcranial direct current stimulation—has caught the interest of academic researchers. British neuroscientists have claimed it can make people better at learning math. A team at Harvard has found promise for depression and chronic pain. Others are looking into using it to treat tinnitus and eating disorders and to speed up stroke recovery. Hundreds of papers have been published, and clinical trials are under way.
Though these are still early days for the research—many of the studies are small and the effects modest—it has inspired largely enthusiastic media coverage (“the electric thinking cap that makes you cleverer … and happier!” one British newspaper gushed) and spawned a community of DIY brain zappers.
Williams is one of its leaders. The treatments have made a huge difference in his life, he says. He retains more information from the tedious journal articles he has to read for work, and he feels more creative. On his blog, SpeakWisdom, he posts technically detailed reviews of stimulation devices and cheerfully gives advice to anyone considering trying it for the first time. He’s got lots of company. A subreddit devoted to the practice has nearly 4,000 subscribers who actively follow the scientific research and share tips on where to place the electrodes on your head if, say, you’re depressed, too impulsive, or just want to amp up your creativity.
Williams is spreading the brain-zapping idea closer to home too. He has built brain stimulators for his wife (he couldn’t keep the secret very long) and several friends and acquaintances. All in all, he has persuaded at least a dozen people to give it a try. One says she’s gone off antidepressants for the first time in 20 years. Another says brain stimulation is helping him get his ADD under control. Several ambitious middle-aged professionals say the devices have boosted their memory and focus.
Entrepreneurs are starting to get in on the action. A company called foc.us has already planted a flag with a commercial brain-stimulation headset released last year. It’s marketed as a gadget for videogamers looking to improve their skills, thus skirting the need for FDA approval. The first batch of 3,000 sold out in just a few months. So did the second.
With easy access to the research, the equipment, and each other, self-experimenters aren’t consulting their doctors or waiting for scientific consensus. They’re zapping first and asking questions as they go.
When he got home, he took his supplies into his office. He heated up his soldering iron, hoping his wife wouldn’t see what he was up to. He fished a few wires out of his desk and built a simple circuit. Using alligator clips, he connected the circuit to two kitchen sponges soaked in saline and strapped them to his head with a sweatband. He positioned one sponge just above his right eyebrow and the other up high on the left side of his forehead. Then he snapped the battery into place, turned a small dial, and sent an electric current into his brain.
It’s been nearly two years since Williams cobbled together his first device, and he has been electrifying his brain two to three times a week ever since. Often he does it for about 25 minutes in the evening while reading on the couch. Sometimes it’s while he’s doing laundry or other chores. It’s become just another part of his routine, like brushing his teeth.Williams got the idea from a news story about how Air Force researchers were studying whether brain stimulation could cut pilot training time. The military is not alone in thinking that brain zapping may improve mental function. In recent years, the method—technically known as transcranial direct current stimulation—has caught the interest of academic researchers. British neuroscientists have claimed it can make people better at learning math. A team at Harvard has found promise for depression and chronic pain. Others are looking into using it to treat tinnitus and eating disorders and to speed up stroke recovery. Hundreds of papers have been published, and clinical trials are under way.
Though these are still early days for the research—many of the studies are small and the effects modest—it has inspired largely enthusiastic media coverage (“the electric thinking cap that makes you cleverer … and happier!” one British newspaper gushed) and spawned a community of DIY brain zappers.
Williams is one of its leaders. The treatments have made a huge difference in his life, he says. He retains more information from the tedious journal articles he has to read for work, and he feels more creative. On his blog, SpeakWisdom, he posts technically detailed reviews of stimulation devices and cheerfully gives advice to anyone considering trying it for the first time. He’s got lots of company. A subreddit devoted to the practice has nearly 4,000 subscribers who actively follow the scientific research and share tips on where to place the electrodes on your head if, say, you’re depressed, too impulsive, or just want to amp up your creativity.
Williams is spreading the brain-zapping idea closer to home too. He has built brain stimulators for his wife (he couldn’t keep the secret very long) and several friends and acquaintances. All in all, he has persuaded at least a dozen people to give it a try. One says she’s gone off antidepressants for the first time in 20 years. Another says brain stimulation is helping him get his ADD under control. Several ambitious middle-aged professionals say the devices have boosted their memory and focus.
Entrepreneurs are starting to get in on the action. A company called foc.us has already planted a flag with a commercial brain-stimulation headset released last year. It’s marketed as a gadget for videogamers looking to improve their skills, thus skirting the need for FDA approval. The first batch of 3,000 sold out in just a few months. So did the second.
With easy access to the research, the equipment, and each other, self-experimenters aren’t consulting their doctors or waiting for scientific consensus. They’re zapping first and asking questions as they go.
by Greg Miller, Wired | Read more:
Image: Gregory Miller
The Biggest Filer of Copyright Lawsuits? X-Art.com
In 2006, Colette Pelissier was selling houses in Southern California, and her boyfriend, Brigham Field, was working as a photographer of nude models. Colette wanted to leave the real-estate business, so she convinced her boyfriend to start making adult films. “I had this idea, when the real-estate market was cooling—you know, maybe we could make beautiful erotic movies,” she said.
By 2009, they had started shooting adult films in places like Madrid and Prague, and launched a Web site, X-art.com. The site promises erotica featuring “gorgeous fashion models” from “the USA, Europe, South America and Beyond.” For forty dollars a month, subscribers have unlimited access to a growing collection of short films. The site attracted a few hundred subscribers in its first year, then a couple thousand the next; it became profitable by 2010. The couple married in 2011; Pelissier changed her last name to Pelissier Field. That year, she noticed a change at X-art.com: the number of subscribers—the site had about fifty thousand by then—had stopped growing. The Fields hired an outside company to investigate whether people were watching their films without paying. They concluded that, each month, three hundred thousand people were watching pirated versions of their movies—including eighty thousand in the U.S. “We felt like we had to do something,” she said. “I don’t want to wake up in five years and have everything be free.”
Adult-film companies are not the only ones that face piracy made possible by Internet file-sharing, and the Fields weren’t the first to consider legal action. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America started suing thousands of people suspected of illegally sharing music, stopping only after piracy declined and legitimate sales rose. In a lawsuit in 2011, the production company Voltage Pictures accused about twenty-five thousand defendants of stealing its movie “The Hurt Locker”; after announcing that it had reached a series of settlements with accused thieves, it dropped the vast majority of cases.
A handful of adult-film companies had also filed copyright-infringement lawsuits against suspected online thieves, and the Fields decided to try it themselves. To identify thieves, the Fields hired outside computer investigators who tracked I.P. addresses where their movies were being illicitly shared via BitTorrent, a file-sharing program. (Using BitTorrent is different from visiting a video-streaming site like YouTube. A BitTorrent user not only downloads a movie but his or her computer automatically uploads a tiny piece of that movie for other file sharers—a process that makes BitTorrent users who view pirated movies liable for copyright infringement.) In February, 2012, the Fields filed their first suits against suspected pirates.
By 2013, subscriptions had declined to below fifty thousand. The Fields ramped up their annual production budget to around two million dollars, hoping to lure more subscribers with fresher material. They started to post new films on X-art.com nearly every day. Their investment in high-quality production paid off when “Farewell”—a narrative-driven film about two lovers on the run in the California desert —attracted a glowing review: Adam Baidawi wrote in British GQ that year that “the mom-and-pop American start-up has grown into a global production team,” making “perhaps the world’s most sophisticated cinema erotica.” In 2013, the Fields purchased a sixteen-million-dollar coastal mansion in Malibu. Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than thirteen hundred copyright-infringement lawsuits—more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all U.S. copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer—against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.
Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others. “Please be advised that I am ninety years old and have no idea how to download anything,” one defendant wrote in a letter, filed in a Florida court. Nearly every case settles on confidential terms, according to a review of dozens of court records. Malibu Media’s attorney, Keith Lipscomb, said that most defendants settle by paying between about two thousand and thirty thousand dollars. The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.
By 2009, they had started shooting adult films in places like Madrid and Prague, and launched a Web site, X-art.com. The site promises erotica featuring “gorgeous fashion models” from “the USA, Europe, South America and Beyond.” For forty dollars a month, subscribers have unlimited access to a growing collection of short films. The site attracted a few hundred subscribers in its first year, then a couple thousand the next; it became profitable by 2010. The couple married in 2011; Pelissier changed her last name to Pelissier Field. That year, she noticed a change at X-art.com: the number of subscribers—the site had about fifty thousand by then—had stopped growing. The Fields hired an outside company to investigate whether people were watching their films without paying. They concluded that, each month, three hundred thousand people were watching pirated versions of their movies—including eighty thousand in the U.S. “We felt like we had to do something,” she said. “I don’t want to wake up in five years and have everything be free.”Adult-film companies are not the only ones that face piracy made possible by Internet file-sharing, and the Fields weren’t the first to consider legal action. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America started suing thousands of people suspected of illegally sharing music, stopping only after piracy declined and legitimate sales rose. In a lawsuit in 2011, the production company Voltage Pictures accused about twenty-five thousand defendants of stealing its movie “The Hurt Locker”; after announcing that it had reached a series of settlements with accused thieves, it dropped the vast majority of cases.
A handful of adult-film companies had also filed copyright-infringement lawsuits against suspected online thieves, and the Fields decided to try it themselves. To identify thieves, the Fields hired outside computer investigators who tracked I.P. addresses where their movies were being illicitly shared via BitTorrent, a file-sharing program. (Using BitTorrent is different from visiting a video-streaming site like YouTube. A BitTorrent user not only downloads a movie but his or her computer automatically uploads a tiny piece of that movie for other file sharers—a process that makes BitTorrent users who view pirated movies liable for copyright infringement.) In February, 2012, the Fields filed their first suits against suspected pirates.
By 2013, subscriptions had declined to below fifty thousand. The Fields ramped up their annual production budget to around two million dollars, hoping to lure more subscribers with fresher material. They started to post new films on X-art.com nearly every day. Their investment in high-quality production paid off when “Farewell”—a narrative-driven film about two lovers on the run in the California desert —attracted a glowing review: Adam Baidawi wrote in British GQ that year that “the mom-and-pop American start-up has grown into a global production team,” making “perhaps the world’s most sophisticated cinema erotica.” In 2013, the Fields purchased a sixteen-million-dollar coastal mansion in Malibu. Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than thirteen hundred copyright-infringement lawsuits—more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all U.S. copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer—against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.
Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others. “Please be advised that I am ninety years old and have no idea how to download anything,” one defendant wrote in a letter, filed in a Florida court. Nearly every case settles on confidential terms, according to a review of dozens of court records. Malibu Media’s attorney, Keith Lipscomb, said that most defendants settle by paying between about two thousand and thirty thousand dollars. The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.
by Gabe Friedman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: X-Art
The Rise of the Voluntariat
[ed. In the community I live in which skews toward older retired people, there's no shortage of volunteers for just about anything. Great right? But, the economic impact of that just dawned on me the other day when I stopped by the local hospital to check on something. While I was there I got in a conversation with a volunteer at the information desk and asked how many other people like him were currently working there (this is just a small-to-medium sized hospital). 123. One hundred and twenty three - doing all kinds of jobs, like landscaping, admitting, patient accounts, gift shop clerking, etc. Jobs that normally might have been filled by people being paid actual wages. Like this article, my first thoughts drifted toward internships and how similar the situation seemed to be, with corporations increasingly relying on a workforce of willing unpaid labor. At least at the hospital they're given a free lunch.]
Coursera’s GTC offers the clearest instance yet of an emerging labor force in digital capitalism, which I suggest we call the voluntariat.The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.
But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.
And the voluntariat is not, like the proletariat, the instrument of its own dispossession. Rather, its contribution of uncompensated work accelerates deskilling and undermines the livelihood of those who do not have the luxury of working for free — in this case, professional translators who cannot afford to give away their labor.
In recent years, companies have made enormous use of two major strategies for extracting economic value without compensating those who originate it: unpaid internships and social media. Coursera’s invention of a translation voluntariat synthesizes some of the most effective aspects of both of these strategies for the empowerment of capital and pauperization of labor.
Unpaid internships have allowed companies to command an-ever expanding labor force at no cost, but the potential of unpaid internships to devalue work further and further up the skill ladder has intrinsic limits. The very institutional existence of internships, after all, entails the (usually false) promise of essential skills acquisition that will lead to future paid work. In other words, unpaid internships will always require there to continue to be paid positions somewhere in an organization, because employers lure candidates into them in large part by dangling before them the possibility of eventual promotion to one of those positions.
The GTC presents no similar difficulties for the capitalist: it solicits the voluntariat’s labor with the sole assurance that that labor constitutes its own reward. The “Do What You Love” mantra central to unpaid internships plays a role here, but the illusion of a career-building apprenticeship that persists as the justification of internships has been removed. For the moment, Coursera is still offering salaries to some workers (mostly engineers), but there is no reason in principle why all the “careers” the company currently advertises could not be reimagined as “global communities” of volunteers.
by Geoff Shullenberger, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: via:
Thursday, May 15, 2014
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