Amani Willett
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You See Sneakers, These Guys See Hundreds Of Millions In Resale Profit

Shirod Ince sat at the front of a line of more than 100 people, mostly guys in their early 20s, on a Friday evening last month. For two days, he and his friends had been taking turns waiting outside a Foot Locker in Harlem to buy the new LeBron sneaker. Through the long, restless hours, they had sustained themselves on Popeye’s, McDonald’s and a belief that it would all pay off in the end.

Ince had no plans to wear the new Nikes. No, for the past two years, the 22-year-old basketball coach has been reselling the sneakers he waits for. And he thought he could double, triple, possibly even quadruple his money for this particular pair, getting anywhere between $500 and $900 for a sneaker that was selling for $250 retail.

“I’ve been here since Wednesday. I have to get it,” he said. “It’s going to be crazy in the morning.”

Ince thinks of himself as a small-time entrepreneur, but in reality he’s part of a complex, rubber-soled mini economy — one with “buyers, sellers, brokers, market-makers and third-party valuation services,” said Josh Luber, who founded Campless, a blog about sneaker data.

Luber, 36, understands this market better than anyone. Since 2012, he has compiled data on more than 13 million eBay auctions and posted his analysis on Campless, creating a price guide he calls the Kelley Blue Book of sneakers. The site tracks the prices of more than 1,100 pairs of collectible sneakers — that is, sneakers that sell on the secondary market above their primary market, or retail, price.

The markup can be astonishing. The average eBay price of the LeBron 10 What the MVP sneaker? $2,086. The Nike Air MAG Back to the Future? $5,718. How about the Air Yeezy 2 Red October, designed by Kanye West and released by Nike this year for $250 retail? It sold on eBay for an average price of $2,958, with almost two dozen people paying at least $8,000, Luber said.1

Luber — a fanatical sneaker collector himself, with 178 pairs on display in his home — says eBay’s sneaker business totaled $338 million in the last year, up 31 percent from the year before. Sneakers, he says, have become “boxes of cash” for many people. As soon as Foot Lockers across the country open each Saturday, thousands of pairs are on eBay.

None of this happens, of course, without the complicity of Nike, which is on track to hit $30 billion in sales this year. By inventing the concept of a limited sneaker, the company helped spawn a secondary market that puts money in the pockets of Ince and other investors.

It’s puzzling behavior for a money-making behemoth. So lately Luber has been fixated on a complicated question: Is Nike leaving money on the table — and giving up profits to the secondary market — by limiting the supply of certain lines of its sneakers? And if so, why?

by Lisa Chow, FiveThirtyEight |  Read more:

Image:Nike New Balance MH998XNB via:

Dick Picky

Traditionally functioning as little more than late-night infomercials, often with hilariously utilitarian demonstrations of size, dick pics have been shared en masse on dating sites and social apps for years. The dick-pic economy is thriving, replicating a whole host of our cultural malaises in miniature: Aggressively insecure men harass women whose disinterest is irrelevant to them, blithely sailing past boundaries to demand that their manhood be looked at and validated; scornful women pass them on to girlfriends with less-than-smiling emoji. Dick pics are routinely shared the first time without consent on the part of the recipient and are widely loathed for this reason. Yet they’re also intimate, amateur portraits of the genitals of men, sometimes very lonely men, which gives rise to a kind of dual nature: The dick pic is hostile yet pitiable, aggressive but also acutely pathetic. They’re also almost invariably ugly. Dick pics are, on the whole, dull and artless, inexpertly captured and painfully unerotic.

A year ago I started Critique My Dick Pic, a blog that is not safe for work unless your workplace is chill. The premise is simple: Men and other people with dicks send me photos thereof, and I critique the photos with love. I have a general policy of being gentle about people’s bodies, including their genitals (the blog’s motto is “100% ANON, NO SIZE SHAMING”), but I was also feeling particularly magnanimous toward dick pics the day that the blog was born. I’m often asked why I started CMDP, and the truth is that I woke up one morning to a dick pic so good that I felt inspired to change the others. That’s all it was—one excellent, well-planned pic from a person whose dick I explicitly wanted to see. I was jarred by how unnecessarily rare that move was and struck by the conviction that people with dicks could do better.

Determining a dick pic’s worth is partly intuitive, and the criteria can be hard to articulate. Still, I find myself repeating certain directives. Put some thought into the lighting, pose, and tone of your shot. Remove that pile of dirty laundry or half cup of moldy tea visible in the background, which usually constitutes a bulk of your photo and should therefore look nice and not distracting. Finally, divorce your preoccupation with the size of your member from its pictorial representation. An obsession with size is the key cause of mediocrity in dick pics. I get plenty of submissions from men who are painfully insecure about their size, but there’s also a subculture of submitters who are staunchly proud of their penises, no matter how small or large. That’s commendable, except that pride doesn’t always translate into virtue, and great dick pics tend to happen when you forget about length and focus on quality. The most important tip, though, is this: Spare some thought for the desires of the person at the receiving end of your dick pic, especially if that person is a woman, because historically she’s been excluded as a consideration in the exchange altogether. (...)

In other words, I wanted the site to promote the female gaze. That goal is still laudable and, one year on, I still think it matters: We live in a world that overwhelmingly values and prioritizes male pleasure, and our mainstream pornography treats male viewers as default, whether or not they’re straight, while glossy magazine articles ostensibly for women are all about how to please men (10 Tricks to Make Him Go Wild! Your Own Pleasure?! Who Cares!). Dated ideas about female sexuality linger in our cultural psyche, whispering to us that we simply aren’t visual creatures, that we prefer literary erotica and gently whispered romanticisms, and that most of us are the good type of woman who would fall apart at the sight of a gang bang. We need more sexual material that assumes a female audience, and we need more honest representations of female desire. But the longer I stuck with running Critique My Dick Pic, the less convinced I was that the female gaze is an adequate term.

by Madeleine Holden, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Lust for Lulu

How the yoga brand Lululemon turned fitness into a spectator sport.

Just five minutes on my mat and I’ve already broken one of the yamas, the founding commandments of yoga put down by the guru Patanjali 2,000 years ago. The yama brahmacharya prohibits lust, but it’s a very hard commandment to follow, particularly in Manhattan, particularly on this perfect summer Thursday night in Bryant Park, surrounded by 400 women, all in excellent health. They’re here for Lululemon Athletica’s twice-weekly open yoga practice, and most of them are in Lulu pants made out of formfitting Luon, a fabric celebrated mainly for its ability to shape and display the ass.

Lululemon, if you don’t know, is a brand of yoga apparel. The signature Lulu piece is the $98 Groove Pant, cut with all kinds of special gussets and flat seams to create a snug gluteal enclosure of almost perfect globularity, like a drop of water free from gravity. Lululemon makes tops too, racer-backed tanks in bright neon and stripes, as well as sports bras like the Ta Ta Tamer.

Lululemon has four stores in Manhattan and a brand-new one in Park Slope, and they’re reliably crowded. The company’s following is devout, weirdly so, and hundreds regularly turn out for its free yoga classes here in the park. If you pay any attention to tight pants in Manhattan, you’ve probably seen Lululemon’s logo, an iridescent little A that looks like an omega. As an on-again-off-again speculator in Lululemon’s hot little stock, I’ve been paying careful attention to tight pants in Manhattan, and I once purchased 100 shares after passing three women in a row wearing Lulu pants. (I’m out now, by the way.) Often, “Luluheads”—as Lululemon’s New York community-relations director calls the brand’s fans—wear Lululemon top and bottom, as in the case of the women to my left and right, who are also on special Lululemon yoga mats.

Music—sitar and bongo—accompanies the class, provided by a duo calling themselves Yoga Organix. Following instructions, all 400 of us lift our butts to the sky in yoga’s “downward dog” pose, under what must surely be the brahmacharya-busting gaze of 60 floors of corporate workers in the glassy towers all around.

“Don’t be shy,” intones Elena Brower, founder of Virayoga in Soho, who is leading the class. She’s got yogi voice, that special combo of ethereal satisfaction and perfect timbre that sounds like a massage. “Push up,” she says. “Push! So that you can feel the sassiest opening in your seat that you can feel right now!”

You can’t help but want to please a voice like that, so I push out even farther and open my sassy seat wider to the sky. (...)

Avril Lavigne wears Lulu. Brooke Shields wears Lulu. Felicity Huffman, Jennifer Garner, Courteney Cox, Kate Winslet, and Kate Hudson wear Lulu. There are Lululemon blogs with names like Lululemon Addict and hundreds of Facebook groups, many devoted to celebrating Lululemon’s ability to make butts look great, with evidentiary photographs.

Last, and perhaps most telling, some kind of turning point has certainly been reached when my wife finds she can easily sell her used Lululemon tops on eBay. These are not Prada blazers that don’t fit. My wife does hot yoga, sweating in a furnacelike studio, but her old tops still sell in just a couple of hours for about 60 percent of what she paid. This is a relative bargain compared with the bags, which are available free at the stores but go for as much as $5 on eBay.

Like my wife, most Luluheads believe the clothing is superior in every way to what else is out there; longer-lasting, more comfortable, and, yes, most flattering. All true, but socially speaking, Luluheads are much like sailors who wear their deck shoes in town—“Oh, what, these? Why, yes, I do happen to own a boat.” Tight yoga pants are a nice way of letting people know that you’re spiritual and healthy, can pay $20 a class for yoga, and are very flexible.

by Bryant Urstadt, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Summer Starling/Courtesy of Lululemon

A Field Guide to the True American Diner

The True American Diner is a casual sit-down restaurant that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner—all three meals—all day, often for all twenty-four hours of it. Time has no meaning in the presence of eggs, steak and hash browns. Portions are large but not obscene; sides are available with nearly everything. The food is sturdy and simple, a few strong flavors and techniques. Nothing in a True American Diner couldn’t be made by a moderately skilled cook in their own kitchen: corned beef hash, club sandwiches, and a variety of scrambles.

Menus are oversized and presented as a single, huge laminated page with unavailable items taped over, or in a leather-bound binder. Everything in the “diet” section of the menu contains cottage cheese or is steamed. There are daily specials, and they come with soup or salad. Chicken Parmesan and mozzarella sticks must be available. Ketchup is served in bottles, not packets. The coffee is available and drunk at every meal; cups may even be set out on the table before patrons arrive. Refills are free and assumed to be always wanted, unless you indicate you want no more by turning the coffee cup over. Dessert is pie, and if displayed in a glass case at the end of the counter, it must rotate. We did not free ourselves from England's cruel yoke to have static pie. (...)

True American Diners exist in a bubble of no-nonsense egalitarianism; they exist outside socioeconomic distinctions, because there is something for everyone. There are always at least two retired people at the counter; they will never speak to each other or anyone else. Someone is on the run from the law; someone is the law. There are always at least two teenagers in a True American Diner and they are simultaneously talking about nothing and having The Most Important Conversation Of Their Lives. You wouldn’t go there for a special occasion, but you can always go there after one: proms, weddings, or funerals.

by John Leavitt, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Tony Fischer

Bank of America Made $168 Million Last Quarter, More or Less

Bank of America reported earnings this morning, and here is your fun quiz on those earnings. It has one question. The question is, was Bank of America's income last quarter:

1. more than zero, or
2. less than zero?

I mean, right there in the headline of the earnings release, you can see that Bank of America made $168 million last quarter, which is a positive number with nine whole digits. It had to pay $238 million of dividends to its preferred stockholders, though, so after those dividends it lost $70 million, a negative number. So right there it's a mess.

How did it make that $168 million or whatever? Well, you know, it's a bank, it makes loans and stuff, so it gets paid some interest. Specifically it got paid $12.9 billion in interest last quarter. Also it charges fees for credit cards and mergers or whatever; those fees probably came to around $8.1 billion. And it made about $2.9 billion in various trading-related ways, selling bonds and stuff, and other miscellanea. So total revenue was about $23.8 billion. So Bank of America's earnings, under generally accepted accounting principles, were about 0.7 percent of its total revenue.

Or put another way: Earnings is the change in value of your assets, minus the change in your liabilities. Bank of America has about $2.1 trillion of assets. (You gotta keep the m's and b's and tr's straight here.) So that $168 million of income was 0.008 percent of assets.

How much precision do you think that $168 million number has? Like, if I made $168 million, I would know about it. Depositing $168 million in my bank account would be a dramatic change to my bank account. If you asked me how much money I had in my bank account, I would say "$168 million!" though there would probably be more exclamation points. I would be wrong -- I have some money in my bank account now, so adding $168 million would produce a number that is ever so slightly more than $168 million -- but I'd also be close enough for any reasonable purposes. The money I have in my account now would be a rounding error.

Bank of America's earnings are a rounding error. If Bank of America's measurement of its revenue was off by one percent, then that would more than wipe out (or double) its net income for the quarter. If Bank of America's measurement of its assets was off by one percent of one percent, then that would more than wipe out (or double) its net income for the quarter.

Is it conceivable that Bank of America's measurement of its assets could be wrong? Well, as of June 30, Bank of America had $27.7 billion of "assets and liabilities where values are based on valuation techniques that require inputs that are both unobservable and are significant to the overall fair value measurement," a technical term meaning that Bank of America takes its best guess about how much those assets are worth. Again: If that guess was off by one percent, that would more than wipe out (or double) Bank of America's net income for the quarter.

Or: Bank of America has $891.3 billion of loans on its balance sheet. Some of those loans will go bad. Bank of America currently expects that about 1.69 percent of them, or $15.1 billion worth, will go bad, so it reduces its assets for accounting purposes by $15.1 billion. If in fact Bank of America should have increased that number to 1.72 percent, that would wipe out its net income for the quarter.

I submit to you that there is no answer to the quiz. It is not possible for a human to know whether Bank of America made money or lost money last quarter.

None of this is meant to make fun of Bank of America, really. This is true of every bank, every quarter, to a greater or lesser degree, though usually their earnings are a bit more distinguishable from zero. A bank is a collection of reasonable guesses about valuation. It is a purely statistical process. There is no objective reality. At best, there is a probability distribution, a reason to reject the null hypothesis with some level of confidence. If a $100 billion bank announces $5 billion of earnings this quarter, there is a high (not 100 percent!) probability that it made more than zero dollars. If a $2.1 trillion bank announces $168 million of earnings, that probability is like 50.1 percent. Did Bank of America make money last quarter? Maybe! It's an ever-so-slightly biased coin flip.

by Matt Levine, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harrer

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Sea Change

You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows. 

– Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965 

Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange. 

– William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Did you feel the economic weather change this week? The shift was subtle, like fall tippy-toeing in after a pleasant summer to surprise us, but I think we’ll look back and say this was the moment when that last grain of sand fell onto the sandpile, triggering many profound fingers of instability in a pile that has long been close to collapse. This is the grain of sand that sets off those long chains of volatility that have been gathering for the last five years, waiting to surprise us with the suddenness and violence of the avalanche they unleash. (...)

Shakespeare coined the marvelous term sea change in his play The Tempest. Modern-day pundits are liable to apply the word to the relatively minor ebb and flow of events, but Shakespeare meant sea change as a truly transformative event, a metamorphosis of the very nature and substance of a man, by the sea.

In this week’s letter we’ll talk about the imminent arrival of a true financial sea change, the harbinger of which was some minor commentary this week about the economic climate. (...)

Getting back to portents of winter, this week saw two side comments by Federal Reserve members that put a distinct chill in the air.

The first is from William Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a permanent voting member on the FOMC. In a speech at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he pushed back on the idea that it is time to raise rates. While acknowledging the relatively positive stance of the Federal Reserve in its forecast, he said:

While I believe that the risks around this consensus forecast are reasonably well balanced, I also believe that the likelihood that growth will be substantially stronger than the point forecast is probably relatively low. [my emphasis]

He went on to cite weaker than expected consumer spending and the expectation that consumer durable purchases will be weaker in the future (by which I assume he means automobiles, which have been on a blistering, back-to-the-all-time-high pace due to supereasy credit, much of it subprime and with durations beyond five years.) He faults mortgage lenders for the substandard housing recovery, as if the last massacre of lenders was not enough to scar their collective psyche for decades.

(Sadly, he might have a point. Somewhat humorously, Ben Bernanke tells us he was turned down for a mortgage because his income is somewhat unsteady. He did not fit the “check-the-box” protocol of his local mortgage lender. I sympathize. I was turned down multiple times earlier this year before finding willing lenders who actually competed for my business. My business life does not accord with a standard check-the-box mortgage. I read about another business owner who noted that any of his 300 employees could get a mortgage, but he could not because his income was not stable enough. Go figure.)

Each of Dudley’s points was covered in long paragraphs. And then he delivered a short, throwaway line that caught my attention. He cited the growth in the exchange value of the dollar over the last few months as a reason for downside risk. Really? Go back and look at the chart above and see the relatively minor dollar moves of the past few months. Why should dollar strength show up in a list of reasons for upcoming weakness in the US economy?

The next day saw the release of the minutes of the previous month’s FOMC meeting. In the part labeled “Staff Review of the Financial Situation,” the staff mentioned “… responding in part to disappointing economic data abroad, the US dollar appreciated against most currencies over the inter-meeting period, including large appreciations against the euro, the yen, and the pound sterling.”

While there are precedents for the staff review to mention the dollar, it doesn’t happen often.(...) The strengthening dollar is clearly on the minds of the members and staff of the Federal Reserve. Hmmm…

by John Mauldin, The Big Picture | Read more:

Knudsen Berg Hindenes | plank sofa
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NNT

Katherine Carpenter couldn’t sleep. For more than a week she’d been coughing herself awake every night and then hacking until she retched. Finally, she decided to see a doctor.

The physician suspected bronchitis and wrote Carpenter a prescription for heavy-duty cough medicine. She also suggested antibiotics. That’s pretty standard: Up to 80 percent of people who go to a physician for acute bronchitis are prescribed antibiotics. But Carpenter, an import entry agent for UPS, didn’t want antibiotics. She thought they’d stop working if you take them too often, and she suspected her symptoms were caused by a virus, which antibiotics don’t affect anyway.

She didn’t know it, but her hesitation had science on its side: A meta-analysis in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews looked at 17 trials on antibiotics for people with acute bronchitis, and concluded that they only slightly shorten the duration of the illness—if they have any benefit at all. (And of course there’s the issue of antibiotic resistance to consider.) In the end, Carpenter refused the prescription, and her bronchitis eventually cleared up. But the experience left her with the distinct impression that she was just one more patient on the medical assembly line. “I felt like a number,” she says.

Instead of being a number, Carpenter might have preferred to see a number, one that can help us weigh the benefits (or lack thereof) of a treatment. That number exists, and it’s called the number needed to treat. Developed by a trio of epidemiologists back in the ’80s, the NNT describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit. (The NNT for antibiotics in a case of acute bronchitis is effectively infinity, because the medicine is no better at curing the illness than a placebo.)

Consider a couple other examples: If your kid is throwing up and you take her to the hospital, she might get a drug called Zofran. The NNT for that is 5, meaning that only five kids need to take Zofran for one of them to stop throwing up. And if you look at Zofran’s “number needed to harm” (the number of people who would need to take a drug for one to have a bad side effect) the answer is … well, there really isn’t one—no one has a significant side effect.

Now, say you’re pushing 50. You’re healthy, but your doctor suggests you start taking a baby aspirin. Just in case, you know? That NNT is 2,000. That’s how many people have to take a daily aspirin for one (nonfatal) heart attack to be prevented. Statistically speaking: Not especially helpful.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the NNT is not a statistic that’s routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients. But you can look it up on a site that you’ve probably never heard of: TheNNT.com. Started by David Newman, a director of clinical research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital, the site’s dozens of contributors analyze the available studies, crunch the numbers on benefits and harms, and then post the results. While a low NNT is generally “good” and a high NNT is “bad,” you also have to consider the severity of both the illness and the drug’s side effects. Which is why the team added a color-coding system: Green for when a treatment makes sense, yellow for when more study is needed, red for when the harms and the benefits cancel each other out, and black when the harms outweigh the benefits.

Newman’s goal for the site is nothing short of a revolution in medical practice. He wants doctors to base their treatments on good scientific evidence, not tradition, hunch, and the fear that patients will see them as doing nothing. And he wants patients to start demanding such care. That’s the big picture, anyway. For now, he’d be happy if he could just get people looking at medicine in a different way. “People tend to think that if it’s a medical intervention, there’s science behind it,” he says. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. “It is a lie to tell patients to do something without telling them, ‘You should know we’ve done lots of research on this and we can’t find any benefit to it.’”

by Sarah Fallon, Wired |  Read more:

Image:Andrew Hetherington

Through the Nanoscope: A Nobel Prize Gallery

This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to three researchers who developed ways to capture images of living cells at nanoscale resolution — well below the 200 nanometres thought to be the best possible resolution for visible-light microscopes. (...)

A fourth recently-developed super-resolution technique, called structured illumination microscopy (SIM), illuminates samples with stripes of light. A computer program analyses the interference patterns formed by the stripes (usually combining composite pictures with stripes in different orientations) to reconstruct a picture of a cell at about double the resolution limit of optical microscopy. This SIM image shows a three-dimensional view of a human bone cancer cell with actin in purple, DNA in blue, and mitochondria in yellow.

by Richard Van Noorden, Nature | Read more:
Image: Dylan Burnette/NIH/Courtesy of Nikon Small World

Eugène Alain Séguy. Plate No. 7 from Papillons. Paris. 1928.
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Converse Suing 31 Companies Over Knock Off Chucks

The Nike-owned Converse brand yesterday "called foul” on 31 retailers and manufacturers including Walmart, Kmart, Skechers and H&M by filing 22 trademark infringement suits in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. As a Huffington Post hed puts it, Converse is suing “Basically Everyone In The World Over Knockoff Chucks.”

“For generations, the Chuck Taylor, universally known as the ‘Chuck,’ has captured the hearts and minds of millions of consumers, selling over a billion pairs globally during the past century,” Converse CEO Jim Calhoun said in a statement forwarded to the HP’s Alexander C. Kaufman. “We welcome fair competition, but we do not believe companies have the right to copy the Chuck’s trademarked look.”

Although Converse “is suing for monetary damages, its main priority is getting impostors off the shelves,” reports the New York Times’ Rachel Abrams, who broke the story.

“The goal really is to stop this action,” Calhoun told Abrams. “I think we’re quite fortunate here to be in the possession of what we would consider to be an American icon.”

This may be one of those rare occasions where “icon” is not overplayed.

“First came the athletes, then the greasers. Then came the nonconformists, the teenagers and finally the baby boomers,” Abrams writes in her lede. “The shoe manufacturer Converse has sold its brand of cool and whiff of rebellion to generations of Americans.”

Tell me ’bout it.

Before they were “Chucks,” they were “Cons” — at least in our neck of the Bronx woods. And we used to walk more than six miles round trip to an Army Navy store on Fordham Road — careful to avoid the fabled greasers (who we actually never saw) — to get them for $14 instead of the standard $16 or so. They came in two colors, white or black, and two styles, high-top or low-top.

by Thom Forbes, MediaPost |  Read more:

Image: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Jose Augusto Castro
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Algorithmic Menagerie

Algorithmic Menagerie is a continuation of and the MFA thesis work of my long term research exploring artificial life and self-organization in the field of computer-based generative art. Programmed in Processing, Algorithmic Menagerie is an interactive virtual environment inhabited by algorithmic creatures. These creatures with dynamic cellular structures are created using various methods of finite subdivision on geometric objects, and exhibit different kinds of biological interactions with each other, reaching an equilibrium within the simulated ecosystem. Audience participants are invited to intervene or interact in the life processes.

For the audio part of the project, I collaborated with my colleague K. Michael Fox, who designed unique sonification rule for each species and sonified the entire simulated eco-system in real-time using Super Collider.

See it in motion in this video:

Raven Kwok

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Band-Aid Relief

Suppose you're a dumbass. Suppose too, you're trying to make a simple chicken curry and you happen to slice your fingers with a very sharp knife. Blood spurts everywhere - all over your countertops (your freshly cut salad, your nicely sliced bread, your floor, your sink). You turn on a faucet, plunge your hand under the cold water but the blood keeps throbbing out.  So you grab some paper towels, wrap them tightly around your injured hand and go frantically searching for band-aids to staunch the flow of bleeding.

Relief. There they are, right there behind the Maalox. Pulling out the now blood-splattered box, you wrench the lid off, fumble to unstrip each individual band-aid, tear at the paper with your teeth, fumble some more, then finally get one free so you can peel away another layer of backstripping... all the while spurting blood everywhere. By the time you're done your band-aid is useless, it's been soaked and you have to try another one.

Sound familiar?

Hey, Masters of the Universe, Silicon Brainiacs, Entrepreneurs everywhere. Why can't someone develop an efficient band-aid delivery system after all these millennia? I know, you're too busy wiring new fiber-optic trading systems, brainstorming Social Networks, finding the next Angry Birds. Whatever. But, really? C'mon. An efficient band-aid dispenser could win the next Nobel Prize (if for no other reason than an entire world would be grateful).

I know... there are probably products out there that already do something like this. All I have to say to that is, DIE.

If you can't make a market out of a clear-cut no-brainer like this, then get out of the way and let someone who can. Is it so hard to make a dispenser that will produce band-aids like tissue paper, or like those roller-stamp thingies? Is that too much to ask?  Apparently.

by markk
Image: via:
(typing with eight fingers)

Extinction Pop

Can words be pop? A few decades ago, “Anthropocene” did not really exist, but its Google Ngram looks like a swift takeoff, similar in shape to the graphs for atmospheric CO2concentration or species extinction. It is at least bubbling under.

“Anthropocene” doesn’t refer precisely to climate change or global warming. Rather, it indicates the idea that we are living in an era akin to other geological epochs, like the Pleistocene, but characterized by the fact that human activities now make and remake the planetary ecosystem in the most concrete sense: the composition of the earth’s crust, the makeup of its atmosphere, the direct and indirect relations among the whole rig’s parts.

Formulated by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized around 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist, “Anthropocene” is intended to signal a radical break and an absolute catastrophe. In previous epochs, the flora and fauna of the planet were part of a rolling equilibrium. Now anthropos has leapt from its limited role to give the entire ecosystem one direction. This is “the Great Acceleration.” The changes set in motion are at the point of becoming self-reproducing, of proceeding on their own no matter what we do. The direction is toward complete destruction of the planetary equilibrium. We’re taking it all down with us.

The fear haunting such knowledge has made its way into the traditional channels of culture, film especially. Half of the year’s blockbusters fit into Cinema of the Anthropocene. An annihilating power, beyond human scale but still somehow set loose by humans, cannot be recalled; the disaster will be civilizational, planetary—Godzilla, Noah, Edge of Tomorrow. What part of Transformers: Age of Extinction do you not understand?

There is certainly something suggestive about the whirling, recombinatory machines in Transformers, at which the puny humans gaze in apprehensive wonder. Are they the “Anthropocene”? Not really. The word itself is not an analysis. An analysis tells you where to intervene; “Anthropocene” fails this measure utterly. Anthropoi, humans, have a history stretching back at least 50,000 years. The standard accounts of the anthropogenic transformation of the planet date it only to the late eighteenth century, to the invention of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, the cauldron from whence the transformational machines arise.

But there is a fatal risk in associating “Anthropocene” with specific technologies, as if one could abolish them to make things right. Or as if good technology might overcome the bad to rescue humanity—the dream of the Autobots, surely stand-ins these days for green capitalism. But all of this is to misrecognize the history of machines. The idea that humans make machines out of some need to conquer nature, or out of some ineradicable appetite for power and destruction, can’t explain why this deep human nature would be born so suddenly and so late. In point of fact, the trajectory of ecocidal technologies is indissociable from the competition for ever-greater productivity, the need to make ever more things to be sold more swiftly, to exploit labor more effectively. Machines are an effect of capitalism’s compulsion. If we broke them, like the Luddites of 1811, they would be built again. Not because of someone’s greed or shortsightedness, but because capitalists have no choice but to outcompete each other or cease to exist. “Anthropocene,” we might say, is a social relation. It is the penultimate stage of capitalism. You don’t want to see the ultimate.

by Joshua Clover, The Nation | Read more:
Image:uncredited

Path Places: Your Personal Concierge

[ed. Interesting concept, but as the article notes, scalability could be a problem. Plus, how would Places determine if it was actually responsible for a sale (will it rely on merchants to do that, what's their incentive)? What if a customer buys something else? We'll probably be seeing other applications like this in the near future, but the human element in this one already seems kind of... dated.]

Path Talk 1.1 introduced Places, which aims to be a free digital assistant in ways that actually matter. Forget about messaging or humble brags to your friends about where you’re at (really, do we care?). Places is all about you and the places you want to visit. It’s so drastically different from what Path has previously offered that it’s tough to believe it’s coming from the same company. In a blog post, the Path Team, describes the service:

“Places gives you the power to message your favorite local businesses to request appointments, make reservations, or even check out prices and hours. It’s all by text. And it’s all for free. Getting answers from a local business is now as easy as texting a friend. Search for Places like your hair salon, favorite sporting store, or the new restaurant down the street. Then send a message asking for anything — a haircut appointment, availability of running shoes in your size, or reservations for 2 at 8 p.m. Once you send your message, one of our Path Agents will make the phone call on your behalf, doing all the talking for you. And when they get the response, they’ll immediately text you back with the answer or booking. You’ll never have to wait on hold again.” [ed.]

Game-changing announcements don’t happen in earnest very often in this space, but this has the potential to be precisely that. Highfalutin’ outfits like American Express have offered gratis concierge services to those who hold elite credit cards, but actually using those services has proven difficult — for AmEx Platinum card holders, ask yourself the last time you actually used the card’s concierge service to book a ticket. We’re willing to bet it hasn’t been anytime recent. Places works with any data connection, without requiring you to utter a word. Perhaps most importantly, Places relies on a team of actual humans behind the scenes to address your requests, which injects logic and reasoning and ensures that your demands are dealt with professionally.

Will It Work?

It just might. The obvious concerns are monetization and scale. It costs money to hire a network of always-on professionals to address requests as they arrive in real time. But look at it this way: what if you ran a small business and were approached by Path? If Path requested a small percentage of a sale for each person that it referred to you by way of an interaction in Places, might you consider it? There’s no setup cost for your business, and no ongoing risk or management requirements. Many businesses have been looking for something similar to this for years.

Scale could be an issue if revenues can’t match expenses for a prolonged period of time, but as we mentioned before, Path has millions in its coffers to experiment with. If it can cast its net wide enough, and get enough businesses in its network, this is the type of service that would become addictive after a single use. If you don’t believe that, try using Uber just once. Technologies may come and go, but instant gratification will forever be delectable.

by Darren Murph, Gear Patrol |  Read more:

Image: Eric Yang

Glut of Postdoc Researchers Stirs Quiet Crisis in Science

The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease.

But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand.

“It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,” said Gary McDowell, 29, a biologist doing his second postdoc at Tufts University who hopes to set up his own lab in a few years. “There’s this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there’s nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing.”

Postdocs fill an essential, but little-known niche in the scientific pipeline. After spending 6 to 7 years on average earning a PhD, they invest more years of training in a senior scientist’s laboratory as the final precursor to starting labs where they can explore their own scientific ideas.

In the Boston area, where more than 8,000 postdocs — largely in the biosciences — are estimated to work, tough job prospects are more than just an issue of academic interest. Postdocs are a critical part of the scientific landscape that in many ways distinguishes the region — they are both future leaders and the workers who carry out experiments crucial for science to advance.

The plight of postdocs has become a point of national discussion among senior scientists, as their struggles have come to be seen as symptoms of broader problems plaguing biomedical research. After years of rapid growth, federal funding abruptly leveled off and even contracted over the last decade, leaving a glut of postdocs vying for a limited number of faculty jobs. Paradoxically, as they’ve gotten stuck, the pursuit of research breakthroughs has also become reliant on them as a cheap source of labor for senior scientists.

Biomedical research training traditionally has followed a well-worn path. After college, people who want to pursue an advanced degree enroll in graduate school. The vast majority of biology graduate students then go on to do one or more postdoc positions, where they continue their training, often well into their 30s. (...)

The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs — teaching, industry, government or nonprofit jobs, or consulting.

This wasn’t such an issue decades ago, but universities have expanded the number of PhD students they train — there were about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 and 56,800 in 2009. That has had the effect of flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

In 1970, scientists typically received their first major federal funding when they were 34. In 2011, those lucky enough to get a coveted tenure-track faculty position and run their own labs, at an average age of 37, don’t get the equivalent grant until nearly a decade later, at age 42.

Facing these stark statistics, postdocs are taking matters into their own hands. They organized a Future of Research conference in Boston last week that they hoped would give voice to their frustrations and hopes and help shape change.

“How can we, as the next generation, run the system?” said Kristin Krukenberg, 34, a lead organizer of the conference and a biologist in her sixth year as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School after six years in graduate school. Krukenberg plans to apply for faculty positions this year, and said that as she has neared the end of her long years of training, she has begun to think deeply about her future responsibilities to the people in her lab.

“Some of the models we see don’t seem tenable in the long run,” Krukenberg said.

by Carolyn Y. Johnson, Boston Globe | Read more:
Image: Jessica Rinaldi

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