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ortoPilot

[ed. Always loved this song.]

Marc Riboud, China. Shanghi. 2002.
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A Prescription for Life’s Final Stretch

[ed. See also: The Best Possible Day.]

Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” introduces its author as a myopically confident medical school student whose seminar in doctor-patient interaction spent an hour on Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” As a young man, he was not ready to understand the title character’s loneliness, suffering and desire to be pitied. He saw medical compassion as a given and Ivan Ilyich’s condition as something modern medicine could probably cure. He and his fellow students cared about acquiring knowledge and competence. They did not see mortality as part of the medical equation.

Now a surgeon (and rightfully popular author) in his 40s, Dr. Gawande sees why that story was part of his training. “I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I’d have as a doctor — and, really, as a human being — would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can,” he writes.

“Being Mortal” uses a clear, illuminating style to describe the medical facts and cases that have brought him to that understanding. He begins with an anecdote that illustrates how wrong doctors can be if they let their hubris and fear of straight talk meld with a patient’s blind determination to fight on, no matter what. “Don’t you give up on me,” demands a man with cancer, though the surgery he wants cannot possibly cure him. “He was pursuing little more than a fantasy at the risk of a prolonged and terrible death — which was precisely what he got,” Dr. Gawande writes.

Such things happen because modern death-delaying techniques are relatively new in medicine. Which patients have long-term life-threatening conditions and which are really at death’s door? In what Dr. Gawande calls “an era in which the relationship between patient and doctor is increasingly miscast in retail terms,” how easy is it for doctors — trained to solve problems and succeed — to acknowledge that there’s no cure to be had? How many doctors, used to telling their patients how to live, are ready to talk to them about how to die?

Dr. Gawande’s early description of how the body decays with age is nothing if not sobering. It’s one thing to know that arteries harden; it’s another to learn that he, as a surgeon, has encountered aortas so calcified that they crunch. And so it goes with this book’s thorough litany of body parts, from the news that an elderly person’s shrinking brain can actually be knocked around inside his or her skull to the way a tooth can determine a person’s age, give or take five years. Eat and exercise however you want, tell everyone how old your grandparents lived to be: According to “Being Mortal,” none of these factors do much to slow the march of time. (...)

“Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that’s because they do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock,” says Dr. Felix Silverstone, a specialist in the field. To summarize: This hypothetical Old Crock is deaf and forgetful, can’t see, has trouble understanding what the doctor says and has no one chief complaint; he has 15 of them. He has high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis. “There’s nothing glamorous about taking care of any of those things.”

But patients who receive good geriatric care stay happier and healthier, just as old people who can remain at home and aren’t forced into nursing homes are better able to enjoy their lives. This book makes a thorough inquiry into how the idea of the assisted-living facility arose as a supposed improvement on regimented nursing homes but has often become a disheartening place for independent-minded people to have to go. The all-important quality-of-life issue that is used to market such places, Dr. Gawande maintains, is directed more toward the people planning to leave Mom then than toward Mom herself. But he sees a lot of hope in the group living concept, if it is overseen with the residents’ happiness in mind.

by Janet Maslin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tim Llewellyn

Extreme XL de Lagares

[ed. Racing through the city of Porto. Keep your seasick pills close.]

Stephen Workman, 611 view down
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Robbie Robertson

[ed. Wolf of Wall Street. Turn it up.]

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Stevie Nicks Polaroid Selfies c.1976

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Google Scholar: Making the World’s Problem Solvers 10% More Efficient

Anurag Acharya is the key inventor of Google Scholar, but the real origin of the project lies in his college years at the Khargpur campus of the Indian Institute of Technology. The IIT is India’s version of MIT and Stanford combined, and has produced a long list of now-celebrated engineers and executives at Internet companies here and abroad. But even in that elite school, it was difficult for students to get hold of relevant scholarly materials. For Indian high schoolers, it was nearly impossible. “If you knew the information existed, you would write letters,” he says, “That’s what I did. Roughly half of the people would send you something, maybe a reprint. But if you didn’t know the information was there, there was nothing you could do about it.” Acharya was haunted by the realization that the great minds were deprived of inspiration, and the wonderful works that did have the impact they would have because of their limited distribution.

The eventual solution to this problem would be Google Scholar, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this November. Some people have never heard of this service, which treats publications from scholarly and professional journals as a separate corpus and makes it easy to find otherwise elusive information. Others have seen it occasionally when a result pops up on their search activity, and may even know enough to use it for a specific task, like digging into medical journals to gather information on a specific ailment. But for a significant and extremely impactful slice of the population: researchers, scientists, academics, lawyers, and students training in those fields — Scholar is a vital part of online existence, a lifeline to critical information, and an indispensable means of getting their work exposed to those who most need it. (...)

Google Scholar was revolutionary for a number of reasons. Acharya and his team worked hard to get academic publishers to allow Google to crawl their journals. Since many of the articles unearthed by Scholar were locked behind paywalls, simply locating something in a search would not mean that a user could read it. But he or she would know that it existed, and that makes a tremendous difference. (Imagine setting off on a research project and finding out months later that someone had done the same work.) Google also pushed the paywall publishers to allow users to see abstracts of the work. The world’s biggest online archive of journal articles, JSTOR, offered only scans of articles, and had no way to separate the abstract from the whole piece. (Those accessing JSTOR through subscribing institutions could see full text.) So Scholar convinced JSTOR to provide its users to see the first scanned page of the article for free. “Often the first page has the abstract, or in older articles you have the introduction,” says Acharya, whose job title at Google is Distinguished Engineer. “That at least allows you to get a sense of it so you can decide whether you should put in additional effort.” Google Scholar will then provide the information that will help users get the complete text, whether online for free, downloaded for a fee, or in a nearby library.

(All Google users benefited from all that newly crawled information, too, as the company included those articles and books in its general search index.)

At launch, Google Scholar won wide acclaim, even from those generally skeptical about the company. Two well known library scientists, Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price wrote, “When big announcements come from Google and web engines, we often get nervous…. Not this time, however. This is BIG news and something that should have been around for years.” (There was some criticism, though. One complaint was that Google Scholar had no API to allow other services to access it. Others said that since Google didn’t share information like its ranking algorithm and all its sources, it fell short of a “scholarly” standard.)

Some in the research community favorably contrasted it to Google’s more controversial Book Search, which was launched at the same time. Scholar avoided the sort of copyright controversy that Book Search generated, despite the fact scholarly publishing world is a war zone, with an increasing number of academics lodging protests against powerful publishers who control the major journals. This is a conflict pitting profit against public good. It was the principle of open research that led Internet activist Aaron Swartz to download a corpus of JSTOR documents legally provided to MIT; the government prosecution of that act ended only with Swartz’s suicide. Google Scholar does not officially take a stand on the issue, but its implicit philosophy seems to endorse an egalitarian spread of information. In any case, when possible, Scholar tries to help negotiate around paywalls for non-subscribers by linking to articles in multiple locations — often, authors of paywalled works have free versions on their personal websites. (...)

Only at Google, of course, would the world’s most popular scholarly search service be seen as a relative backwater. Acharya isn’t permitted to reveal how big Scholar’s index is, though he does note that it’s an order of magnitude bigger than when it started. He can also say, “It’s pretty much everything — every major to medium size publisher in the world, scholarly books, patents, judicial opinions, small, most small journals…. It would take work to find something that’s not indexed.” (One serious estimate places the index at 160 million documents as of May 2014.) But like it or not, the niche reality was reinforced after Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, and adopted an approach of “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Scholar was not discarded — it still commands huge respect at Google which, after all, is largely populated by former academics—but clearly shunted to the back end of the quiver. Not only was Scholar missing from the list of top services (Image Search, News, etc.) but bumped from the menu promising “more” services like Gmail and Calendar. Its new place was a menu labeled “even more.”

Asked who informed him of what many referred to as Scholar’s “demotion,” Acharya says, “I don’t think they told me.” But he says that the lower profile isn’t a problem, because those who do use Scholar have no problem finding it. “If I had seen a drop in usage, I would worry tremendously,” he says. “There was no drop in usage. I also would have felt bad if I had been asked to give up resources, but we have always grown in both machine and people resources. I don’t feel demoted at all.”

by Steven Levy, Medium/Backchannel |  Read more:

Image: Talia Herman

“Is this from the community garden? It tastes sanctimonious.”

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Copywrong

Rod Stewart is being sued over the rights to an image of his own head.

In 1981, a professional photographer named Bonnie Schiffman took a picture of the back of Stewart’s head, which was used, eight years later, on the cover of the album “Storyteller.” Now a different picture of Stewart’s head, also from the back, has been used to promote his Las Vegas act and world tour. Schiffman claims that the resemblance between her photograph and the new image is too close—the legal term is “substantial similarity”—and she is suing for copyright infringement. She is asking for two and a half million dollars.

A copyright is, first and foremost, the right to make a copy. The first products to be protected by copyright—the statutory history begins in Britain, in 1710, with the passage of a law known as the Statute of Anne—were books. Once you buy a book, you can legally do almost anything to it. You can sell it to someone else, you can tear the pages out, you can throw it on a bonfire. God knows you can print terrible things about it. But you cannot make copies of it. The right to do that belongs to the author of the book and his or her heirs and assigns.

As with any right, the right to make a copy is a lot less straightforward than it sounds. As the person who wrote this article, I own the right to make copies of it. Since 1976, in the United States, that right has been born with the article, and there are few formalities still required for me to assert it. The belief that you have irrecoverably forfeited your copyright if you have not sent a copy of your book to the Library of Congress, or put a © on it somewhere, is obsolete.

I have granted The New Yorker an exclusive license to the article for a limited period, after which the magazine retains certain privileges (including printing it in a collection of New Yorker writings and keeping it on its Web site). If, a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article in a book called “The Most Thoughtful and Penetrating Essays of 2014, ” I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated and, if the court agrees with me, legally suppress the book. Theoretically, the court could compel the publisher to pulp all the unsold copies. Although not the author of this piece, you, too, would likely feel that the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” was a bandit, and you would share my sense of righteous indignation.

But suppose that a Web site, awesomestuff.com, ran an item that said something like “This piece on copyright is a great read!” with a hyperlink on the word “piece” to my article’s page on The New Yorker’s Web site. You wouldn’t think this was banditry at all. You would find it unexceptionable.

This is partly because of what might be called the spatial imaginary of the Web. When you click on a link, you have the sensation that you no longer are at a place called awesomestuff.com but have been virtually transported to an entirely different place, called newyorker.com. A visual change is experienced as a physical change. The link is treated as a footnote; it’s as though you were taking another book off the shelf. The Web reinforces this illusion of movement by adopting a real-estate vocabulary, with terms like “site” (on which nothing can be built), “address” (which you can’t G.P.S.), and “domain” (which is a legal concept, not a duchy).

Some courts have questioned the use of links that import content from another Web site without changing the URL, a practice known as “framing.” But it’s hard to see much difference. Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content from me. The folks at awesomestuff.com and their V. C. backers are attracting traffic to their Web site, with its many banner ads for awesome stuff, using material created by other people.

An enormous amount of Web business is conducted in this manner. Most Web users don’t feel indignant about it. On the contrary, most Web users would feel that their rights had been violated if links like this were prohibited. Something that is almost universally condemned when it happens in the medium of print is considered to be just how digital media work. Awesomestuff.com might even argue that no one is harmed by the link—that it is doing me and The New Yorker a favor by increasing our article’s readership at no cost to us. But the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” could say the same thing, and the court would be unmoved.

This almost instinctive distinction between what is proper in the analog realm and what is proper in the digital realm is at the center of a global debate about the state of copyright law. Statutes protecting copyright have never been stricter; at the same time, every minute of every day, millions of people are making or using copies of material—texts, sounds, and images—that they didn’t create. According to an organization called Tru Optik, as many as ten billion files, including movies, television shows, and games, were downloaded in the second quarter of this year. Tru Optik estimates that approximately ninety-four per cent of those downloads were illegal. The law seems to be completely out of whack with the technology.

The point of Peter Baldwin’s fascinating and learned (and also repetitive and disorganized) “The Copyright Wars” (Princeton) is that the dispute between analog-era and digital-era notions of copyright is simply the latest installment of an argument that goes all the way back to the Statute of Anne. The argument is not really about technology, although major technological changes tend to bring it back to life. It’s about the reason for creating a right to make copies in the first place.

by Louis Menand, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Thomas Burden

Drama. Ego. Protocol.

You walk into a fancy dinner and pick up the little envelope that reveals your fate: the seat assignment for the evening. Did you score a prized spot at the best table? Or are you in “Siberia,” consigned to a seat in the back of the room? In a city full of status symbols, nothing distills power more quickly than your literal place at the table.

“Probably the most important single thing at a gala or dinner party is seating,” says Lucky Roosevelt, chief of protocol for the Reagans. “That determines whether or not people are going to have a good time.”

Who sits where is at the center of every social event in Washington — now in the thick of the fall party season — and the issue is complicated by titles, tradition and endless egos.

Roosevelt, who presided over the Washington National Opera’s season opener last month, spent weeks working with Kennedy Center officials on putting guests at just the right table. But a few people switched their seats at the black-tie dinner, which was a major breach of etiquette. “It’s an absolute no-no to change place cards,” she says.

That never stops the senator’s wife (no name for publication, of course, but notorious among hostesses) who used to call before dinners and demand to be seated next to the guest of honor. Most of the time she got her way, but not every time. Now she just combs the room during the cocktail hour to find her chair, then moves her place card to a better seat. And, according to event organizers who have watched her do it, she almost always gets away with it because . . . well, who’s going to tell her to get up and move?

by Roxanne Roberts, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Bill O'Leary

Sarah Sze, Second Means of Egress, 1998
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[ed. I'm going to do this with my new grandson or grandaughter (soon).]

Antonio Merini

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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