Friday, February 20, 2015
The Great SIM Heist
How spies stole the keys to the encryption castle
[ed. The NSA is completely out of control and no one seems capable of doing anything about it, including our President and Congress. It's like the Matrix.]
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. (...)
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.” (...)
Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.” (...)
The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
[ed. The NSA is completely out of control and no one seems capable of doing anything about it, including our President and Congress. It's like the Matrix.]
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. (...)
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.” (...)
Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.” (...)
The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
by Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Thursday, February 19, 2015
The Gig Economy Won't Last Because It's Being Sued to Death
When Vilma and Greta Zenelaj came across a Craigslist job ad that promised they could make as much as $22 an hour and get paid fast, it seemed like a good deal. The Albanian sisters had moved to Santa Monica to get a foothold in the film industry, and though they had produced a few independent features, they had run out of savings before they could also make a living. Now they were desperate to pay their bills.
Handy (then Handybook), the company that posted the Craigslist ad, is best known as a cleaning service. But unlike Merry Maids or your local cleaning franchise, it doesn’t actually employ any cleaners. Instead, it relies on an army of independent contractors to complete jobs, taking a 15% to 20% commission of every hour worked. It’s part of the "gig economy," a much-hyped new class of the service industry where workers are expected to operate like mini-businesses. The influence of these companies is growing: according to an analysis by Greylock Partners, the value of transactions over platforms such as car services Lyft and Uber, grocery delivery service Instacart, courier service Postmates, and others could grow as large as $10 billion this year.
But the Zenelajs had never heard of the gig economy, and it wasn’t until orientation that they realized they would not be employees of Handy.
Soon they were booking up to four cleanings a day through the platform. Handy promised to turn them into entrepreneurs, and it was true that when things went wrong, they were responsible: They didn’t get paid to wait for a client who was running up to 30 minutes late, though they drove to his house (Handy does reimburse cleaners for one hour if the client doesn't show up); they didn’t get paid if they stayed home sick; they didn’t get paid when they got stuck in traffic between jobs. There was no overtime pay or benefits, and they had to buy their own supplies and gas.
But the sisters allege that other kinds of work independence were a farce. When they couldn’t finish a job in the allotted time slot, they had to call customer service if they wanted to stay longer for more pay. First-time clients could not book cleanings with them specifically, which made leveraging relationships for recommendations difficult. They say there were suggestions, which they interpreted as rules, about how to listen to music (only with headphones, with permission from the customer) and go to the bathroom (discreetly). After about two months, both of them were banned from the platform: Handy says one sister performed poorly and the other sister funneled jobs to her after she was banned. (Vilma and Greta say they had just teamed up to complete jobs, which is also against Handy's terms of service, and that's why both of them were fired.)
"It is not fair, because there are laws here," says Vilma. "They are claiming to be just giving us contracts, and they’re not. They’re acting like an employer. But they’re not paying for it."
She and Greta filed a class action lawsuit against Handy in October, alleging that the company misclassified them as independent contractors. They are seeking compensation for missed lunch breaks, minimum wage compensation, reimbursement for business expenses, and overtime, in addition to other penalties. According to Handy’s math, this compensation would cost $291,000, not including attorney’s fees. Not only that, if Vilma and Greta prevailed, the lawsuit would also apply to all its current and former workers in California over the last four years. As of this past fall, that was about 2,000 people. That’s a potential penalty of almost $600 million—a lot of money for a company that has only raised about $42 million in venture capital.
Lawsuits like the one being brought against Handy are just the most threatening cloud in a brewing storm. Uber drivers have protested in San Francisco and Los Angeles and gone on strike in New York. Anecdotes in high-profile stories about Homejoy, a cleaning service similar to Handy, detail grueling hours and so little pay that in one instance, the worker was homeless. Workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online platform that pays independent contractors cents per task, recently orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to Jeff Bezos asking for him "to see that Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment, and open communication." Legally, Uber and Lyft are also facing charges of misclassifying workers, and a case against an online work platform called Crowdflower that uses independent contractors to complete tasks is in the process of being settled.
This rising legal retribution is a huge threat to the gig economy. Not being responsible for employees’ taxes and benefits allows companies like Handy to operate with 20% to 30% less in labor costs than the incumbent competition, leading to eye-popping numbers like Uber’s $40 billion valuation or Instacart’s latest $220 million round of funding. Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy. (...)
What’s at stake with these lawsuits and protests? The very definition of "employee" in a tech-enabled, service-driven 21st century American economy. Gig economy companies do not own cars, hotels, or even their workers’ cleaning supplies. What they own is a marketplace with two sides. On one side are people who need a job done—a ride to the airport, a clean house, a lunchtime delivery. On the other are people who are willing to do that job. If Uber and other companies are going to be as big as some claim, a new deal has to be brokered, one that squares the legal rules governing work with new products and services. What benefits can you expect from a quasi-employer? What does it mean to be both independent and tethered to an app-based company? The social contract between gig economy workers and employers is broken. Who will fix it, and how, will determine the fate of thousands of workers and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Handy (then Handybook), the company that posted the Craigslist ad, is best known as a cleaning service. But unlike Merry Maids or your local cleaning franchise, it doesn’t actually employ any cleaners. Instead, it relies on an army of independent contractors to complete jobs, taking a 15% to 20% commission of every hour worked. It’s part of the "gig economy," a much-hyped new class of the service industry where workers are expected to operate like mini-businesses. The influence of these companies is growing: according to an analysis by Greylock Partners, the value of transactions over platforms such as car services Lyft and Uber, grocery delivery service Instacart, courier service Postmates, and others could grow as large as $10 billion this year.But the Zenelajs had never heard of the gig economy, and it wasn’t until orientation that they realized they would not be employees of Handy.
Soon they were booking up to four cleanings a day through the platform. Handy promised to turn them into entrepreneurs, and it was true that when things went wrong, they were responsible: They didn’t get paid to wait for a client who was running up to 30 minutes late, though they drove to his house (Handy does reimburse cleaners for one hour if the client doesn't show up); they didn’t get paid if they stayed home sick; they didn’t get paid when they got stuck in traffic between jobs. There was no overtime pay or benefits, and they had to buy their own supplies and gas.
But the sisters allege that other kinds of work independence were a farce. When they couldn’t finish a job in the allotted time slot, they had to call customer service if they wanted to stay longer for more pay. First-time clients could not book cleanings with them specifically, which made leveraging relationships for recommendations difficult. They say there were suggestions, which they interpreted as rules, about how to listen to music (only with headphones, with permission from the customer) and go to the bathroom (discreetly). After about two months, both of them were banned from the platform: Handy says one sister performed poorly and the other sister funneled jobs to her after she was banned. (Vilma and Greta say they had just teamed up to complete jobs, which is also against Handy's terms of service, and that's why both of them were fired.)
"It is not fair, because there are laws here," says Vilma. "They are claiming to be just giving us contracts, and they’re not. They’re acting like an employer. But they’re not paying for it."
She and Greta filed a class action lawsuit against Handy in October, alleging that the company misclassified them as independent contractors. They are seeking compensation for missed lunch breaks, minimum wage compensation, reimbursement for business expenses, and overtime, in addition to other penalties. According to Handy’s math, this compensation would cost $291,000, not including attorney’s fees. Not only that, if Vilma and Greta prevailed, the lawsuit would also apply to all its current and former workers in California over the last four years. As of this past fall, that was about 2,000 people. That’s a potential penalty of almost $600 million—a lot of money for a company that has only raised about $42 million in venture capital.
Lawsuits like the one being brought against Handy are just the most threatening cloud in a brewing storm. Uber drivers have protested in San Francisco and Los Angeles and gone on strike in New York. Anecdotes in high-profile stories about Homejoy, a cleaning service similar to Handy, detail grueling hours and so little pay that in one instance, the worker was homeless. Workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online platform that pays independent contractors cents per task, recently orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to Jeff Bezos asking for him "to see that Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment, and open communication." Legally, Uber and Lyft are also facing charges of misclassifying workers, and a case against an online work platform called Crowdflower that uses independent contractors to complete tasks is in the process of being settled.
This rising legal retribution is a huge threat to the gig economy. Not being responsible for employees’ taxes and benefits allows companies like Handy to operate with 20% to 30% less in labor costs than the incumbent competition, leading to eye-popping numbers like Uber’s $40 billion valuation or Instacart’s latest $220 million round of funding. Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy. (...)
What’s at stake with these lawsuits and protests? The very definition of "employee" in a tech-enabled, service-driven 21st century American economy. Gig economy companies do not own cars, hotels, or even their workers’ cleaning supplies. What they own is a marketplace with two sides. On one side are people who need a job done—a ride to the airport, a clean house, a lunchtime delivery. On the other are people who are willing to do that job. If Uber and other companies are going to be as big as some claim, a new deal has to be brokered, one that squares the legal rules governing work with new products and services. What benefits can you expect from a quasi-employer? What does it mean to be both independent and tethered to an app-based company? The social contract between gig economy workers and employers is broken. Who will fix it, and how, will determine the fate of thousands of workers and hundreds of millions of dollars.
by Sarah Kessler, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Henrik Sorensen, Getty Images
PostSecret: The Art of Authenticity
For the past ten years Frank Warren has been collecting and publishing other people’s anonymous secrets, sent via postcard, on his blog, PostSecret. The stories behind the postcards span the entire spectrum of human drama, from tales of petty revenge to accounts of abuse and severe depression. This richness of experience — along with the secrets’ visual design, by now a recognizable mishmash of Americana, well-executed kitsch, and ironic arts & crafts creations — has kept the site popular through multiple waves of internet fads. Originally a local mail art project in suburban Maryland, the site has spawned several books, including The World of PostSecret (released in November 2014), as well as a play, a TED talk, and numerous live events.
I have a longstanding fascination with the history of the Post, a system of communication based on the competing interests of technology, surveillance, and intimacy. Ever since first visiting PostSecret, it has struck me as a project that builds on and plays with that original postal tension: does sending a postcard bring reader and sender closer together, or stress the distance between them? PostSecret harkens back to the days of handwritten correspondences and epistolary novels, but requires a very modern, digital infrastructure to spread its message of healing-via-sharing. Intrigued by the multiple layers at play in his project, I recently chatted with Frank Warren over the phone about the meaning of secrecy in the age of Snapchat and Whisper, the relation between authenticity and anonymity, and the way he chooses which postcards to publish, having received more than 1,000,000 over the past decade.
We all have a fairly decent idea of what the Post is. What is a secret?
I’ve been collecting secrets for ten years and my definition continually evolves and expands. One way to think of a secret is as dark matter — this stuff that makes up 90%-95% of what’s in the universe but that we can’t see, we can’t sense. The only way we know it’s there is how it affects the behavior of other objects. That’s the definition of a secret I’m living with now.
What happens to that dark matter once it becomes visible through a platform like PostSecret?
Maybe it goes from anti-matter to matter? I think the results of sharing a secret can be transformative. They can change who we are, they can create relationships. They can hurt, they can harm, they can heal. My hope is that when people share a secret with me and the world on a postcard, it’s a first step in a longer journey reconciling with that secret.
Do you ever receive follow-ups or updates from people who had sent you their postcards?
Yes! One follow-up I received was from someone who said that he had made up a story that he thought would make a good PostSecret secret and mailed it in. But then, after I scanned it and posted it on the web, he saw that through the mail process, some of the text that he had put on the postcard had been ripped away. And the secret had a new meaning. He went on to say — that secret that went on to appear on the postcard, on the website, was a true one in his life.
I’ve received another email from a woman who said, “I wrote down six secrets on postcards that I was going to send to you, Frank, but instead I left them on the pillow of my boyfriend as he was sleeping, and I went to work. Later that day, he arrives at my work and asks me to marry him, and I said Yes.”
How do you explain — to yourself — the power generated in the process of creating these postcards?
I think that when you’re speaking about secrets you’re talking about self-revelation. You’re talking about, in some cases, coming out to yourself. I was looking at a postcard today to make a selection for the Sunday Secrets on the website. And I saw one about an hour ago that said “Writing out this secret for the first time and reading it made me realize it wasn’t true.” So our secrets can have very complex relationships with who we are. Sometimes by sharing a secret you confirm it, and sometimes the sharing act in and of itself changes the nature of the secret.
I think that when you’re speaking about secrets you’re talking about self-revelation. You’re talking about, in some cases, coming out to yourself. I was looking at a postcard today to make a selection for the Sunday Secrets on the website. And I saw one about an hour ago that said “Writing out this secret for the first time and reading it made me realize it wasn’t true.” So our secrets can have very complex relationships with who we are. Sometimes by sharing a secret you confirm it, and sometimes the sharing act in and of itself changes the nature of the secret.
We live in a strange moment right now — everybody is extremely concerned about surveillance and privacy, yet at the same time we seem to be compelled to share our innermost, most intimate emotions. How does your project relate to this tension?
You talk about the line between what we decide to reveal versus what we decide to conceal. We’ve always had to make that decision — it’s part of the human condition. I would say, though, that it’s much more of a tension now — now it’s an earthquake, with security, social media, and people presenting an image of themselves for public consumption.
I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has. Sometimes the more we try and project an image of ourselves to others — and perhaps to ourselves — the deeper our secrets can hide from us. And so if we can find the courage to look deep and discover, uncover, and share a vulnerable secret, I think those kinds of stories have the most value of all. Not just to the person who’s confessing, but to the community that can hear it.
You talk about the line between what we decide to reveal versus what we decide to conceal. We’ve always had to make that decision — it’s part of the human condition. I would say, though, that it’s much more of a tension now — now it’s an earthquake, with security, social media, and people presenting an image of themselves for public consumption.
I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has. Sometimes the more we try and project an image of ourselves to others — and perhaps to ourselves — the deeper our secrets can hide from us. And so if we can find the courage to look deep and discover, uncover, and share a vulnerable secret, I think those kinds of stories have the most value of all. Not just to the person who’s confessing, but to the community that can hear it.
by Ben Huberman, Longreads | Read more:
Image: PostSecret
If You’re Over 30 And Single, You Should Be Using Tinder
[ed. Um, No: "Because much of the criticism of Tinder seems to actually be, implicitly, a criticism of the machinations of dating, and the ways in which dating causes people to, sometimes, show their worst, judgmental, passive aggressive selves instead of their best selves." No, because you have to be on Facebook to start with, which is the real deal killer.]
Most of the discussion around Tinder has focused on its core demographic: twentysomethings, gay and straight, in urban areas (New York and Los Angeles, where I live, are its two biggest markets), who seem to use Tinder to hook up, boost or masochistically deflate their ego, and/or issue sweeping, usually disparaging pronouncements about everyone they’ve ever encountered on it.But I’ve now come to realize that even though all of the press around Tinder focuses on its popularity with twentysomethings, it’s actually the perfect app for someone in their thirties, or older, to find love. As people age, they naturally grow less inclined to seek out relationships that are more casual. (For one thing, it’s exhausting. After you turn 33 or so, staying out past 10 on a school night becomes much more rare.) Also, as we age, the pool of eligible people shrinks, and with it so do the number of opportunities to meet people in the ways people met people in their twenties (well, before Tinder existed): through friends, at parties, at bars, at work, in grad school, wherever. There’s something really comforting to know that, in fact, there are actually tons of people out there who are age-appropriate and are looking for the same thing you are.
Because much of the criticism of Tinder seems to actually be, implicitly, a criticism of the machinations of dating, and the ways in which dating causes people to, sometimes, show their worst, judgmental, passive aggressive selves instead of their best selves. My co-worker Tamerra recently asked me, “Do people think that the app will relieve people of the responsibility of being sincere, projecting themselves honestly, and communicating what they’re looking for in a relationship the same way they would IRL?” Certainly, Tinder seems to make it easier to not be vulnerable, to put out a bulletproof version of yourself. But Tinder doesn’t make it easier to fall in love just because it makes it easier to be exposed to hundreds, or thousands, of potential dates. To fall in love means you need to really know yourself, and be secure and happy enough that you want to share yourself with someone else, and to be vulnerable. Tinder doesn’t get rid of those steps, and it’s unrealistic to think that it would.
I agree with the psychology professor Eli J. Finkel, who recently defended Tinder as “the best option available now” for “open-minded singles … who would like to marry someday and want to enjoy dating in the meantime.” And I think that’s especially true if you are in your thirties and you are looking for a relationship, and you see dating as a means to that end. There are, of course, exceptions to every single rule, but I found that the people on Tinder in their thirties were, generally, more receptive to the idea of being in a relationship than you would expect. Including me.
by Doree Shafrir, Buzz Feed | Read more:
Image: Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
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Heart Attack Grill
[ed. I'll admit, I'd never heard of the Heart Attack Grill until yesterday when a friend who visits Las Vegas regularly mentioned it. Truth in Advertising!]
On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I stopped by the Heart Attack Grill.The restaurant has been in the news recently after its owner "Doctor Jon" Basso gave a bizarre interview on Bloomberg TV where he said his restaurant kills its customers. He even carried the (alleged) cremated remains of a customer with him.
And while it's a macabre gimmick, it's not entirely inaccurate. Heart Attack Grill is crazy unhealthy: The restaurant's signature dish is its 9,982-calorie Quadruple Bypass Burger, which weighs a staggering 3 pounds. Customers can order burgers with up to eight patties, all topped with chili, tomato, cheese, onion, and bacon (for an extra fee).
Inside, the restaurant has an ironic medical theme with nurse waitresses and hospital-themed decor. Even the customers have to wear hospital gowns, and anyone more than 350 pounds eats for free.
by Megan Willett, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: Megan Willett
Bikes vs. Cars: The Deadly War Nobody's Winning
Concussion or no concussion, Steve Hill wants a new bike. Pronto.
“To be honest with you, I feel like I should have it already,” he says to the woman he’s facing, Megan Hottman, a 35-year-old personal-injury lawyer who’s taking notes on a laptop inside her Golden, Colorado, office. From where I sit, just to the right of Hill*—who is 38 and trim—he looks pretty good, considering that he suffered a concussion and whiplash in a car collision just one week ago. But as I watch him, I have to wonder if he should have even driven himself to this meeting. As a longtime rider, I’ve endured similar injuries: I once went to the ER with a concussion after a crash, and I felt the effects for weeks. Hill has already told Hottman that he’s been experiencing dizzy spells.
*Because of ongoing litigation, the name of Hottman’s client has been changed.
Talking a beat too slowly, Hill describes a big ride he’s supposed to do eight days from now. It’s a Colorado event that took place last summer and covered more than 100 miles and over 13,000 feet of vertical gain—a major undertaking.
Hottman nods. She’s a dedicated rider herself, so she knows all about the hunger to get back on the road. But Hill is in no shape for a day like that, and he’s naive to think that a lawyer can serve up a new high-end bike anytime soon.
“Almost every client sitting in that chair has some event coming up,” Hottman says diplomatically. “These accidents only seem to happen when you have something on the burner.”
Hill’s crash occurred in Boulder, 20 miles north of Golden. Pedaling his $10,000 dream machine on a pleasant summer afternoon, Hill was traveling north on two-lane Cherryvale Road as he approached South Boulder Road. He had the green light as he entered the intersection, at about 25 miles per hour.
Just then, a car turned left in front of him. Hill was far enough away to avoid a crash, but a second car abruptly turned left, too, and he couldn’t dodge it. The vehicle’s right front corner hit his left foot, shearing the pedal cleat off his cycling shoe. The car bulled into the seat tube of Hill’s frame, which snapped. He went flying, helmet first.
“I had very little road rash,” he says. “But I hit my head.”
“Yowzers,” says Hottman, a long, lean, and outgoing ex–professional road racer who now runs her own 50-member cycling team—called TheCyclist-Lawyer.com—and still manages to ride 6,000 miles a year. “Super, super violent!”
Hill again brings up the long ride he wants to do. “Do you think we’d be able to settle in a timely manner?” he asks.
With that, Hottman lifts her hands off the keyboard and peers up from the screen. Cyclists who consider hiring Hottman don’t always know about her out-of-office activities, which include a lot of educational work. She teaches bike-handling skills to beginners. She gives lectures to cops about relevant laws. She’s the coauthor of a forthcoming reference book that’s aimed at every attorney and judge in her field. Hottman has dissected cycling athletically, legally, and ethically, and she’s concluded that, while she dearly loves her two-wheeled brothers and sisters, riders don’t always display sound judgment.
“I’m not pro-cyclist all the time,” Hottman told me when we first spoke months earlier. “I get frustrated when I see riders behaving badly.” (...)
In her office, in the courtroom, in the news, on the Web, and on city streets and country roads, Megan Hottman encounters various species of the same genus: riders who are sure they’ve been wronged and simultaneously believe that cyclists are always right.
Often as not, they have been wronged, but Hottman consistently quotes a statistic that many riders don’t know or choose to ignore: roughly 47 percent of all bike-car mishaps happen because riders are at fault. That figure is debatable—there’s no national database, and Hottman’s use of it derives from small-sample studies, media accounts, and her own experience working on cases over the years. Still, there’s no doubt that riders often behave recklessly on roads and highways. Ask any driver who’s seen them blow through red lights or come screaming the wrong direction down one-way streets.
A particularly sour moment for cycling’s image occurred last September in New York City’s Central Park, when Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two, stepped off a curb and into the path of 31-year-old Harlem cyclist Jason Marshall, who was swerving around other pedestrians and reportedly in an aerodynamic tuck when he hit her. Three days later, Tarlov, the wife of a CBS senior vice president, died from severe head trauma. Marshall, who told reporters that the collision was “unavoidable,” hasn’t been charged with a crime.
In San Francisco in March of 2012, cyclist Chris Bucchere killed an elderly pedestrian in the city’s Castro district, hitting him after running multiple stop signs. According to a report on the mishap in the San Francisco Chronicle, three other pedestrians had been mowed down in the Bay Area in the past year. Bucchere ultimately pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.
We all know that motorists can be reckless and myopic as well, and statistically they may be at fault in car-bike accidents nearly half the time. When drivers screw up or drive too aggressively—or with outright malice—the consequences are usually dire for bicyclists because of the harsh realities of physics. Cars are massive metal beasts; bikes are not. When collisions happen, bikes and their riders get the worst of it, regardless of who’s at fault.
by Andrew Tilin, Outside | Read more:
Image: John Haynes
“To be honest with you, I feel like I should have it already,” he says to the woman he’s facing, Megan Hottman, a 35-year-old personal-injury lawyer who’s taking notes on a laptop inside her Golden, Colorado, office. From where I sit, just to the right of Hill*—who is 38 and trim—he looks pretty good, considering that he suffered a concussion and whiplash in a car collision just one week ago. But as I watch him, I have to wonder if he should have even driven himself to this meeting. As a longtime rider, I’ve endured similar injuries: I once went to the ER with a concussion after a crash, and I felt the effects for weeks. Hill has already told Hottman that he’s been experiencing dizzy spells.
*Because of ongoing litigation, the name of Hottman’s client has been changed.Talking a beat too slowly, Hill describes a big ride he’s supposed to do eight days from now. It’s a Colorado event that took place last summer and covered more than 100 miles and over 13,000 feet of vertical gain—a major undertaking.
Hottman nods. She’s a dedicated rider herself, so she knows all about the hunger to get back on the road. But Hill is in no shape for a day like that, and he’s naive to think that a lawyer can serve up a new high-end bike anytime soon.
“Almost every client sitting in that chair has some event coming up,” Hottman says diplomatically. “These accidents only seem to happen when you have something on the burner.”
Hill’s crash occurred in Boulder, 20 miles north of Golden. Pedaling his $10,000 dream machine on a pleasant summer afternoon, Hill was traveling north on two-lane Cherryvale Road as he approached South Boulder Road. He had the green light as he entered the intersection, at about 25 miles per hour.
Just then, a car turned left in front of him. Hill was far enough away to avoid a crash, but a second car abruptly turned left, too, and he couldn’t dodge it. The vehicle’s right front corner hit his left foot, shearing the pedal cleat off his cycling shoe. The car bulled into the seat tube of Hill’s frame, which snapped. He went flying, helmet first.
“I had very little road rash,” he says. “But I hit my head.”
“Yowzers,” says Hottman, a long, lean, and outgoing ex–professional road racer who now runs her own 50-member cycling team—called TheCyclist-Lawyer.com—and still manages to ride 6,000 miles a year. “Super, super violent!”
Hill again brings up the long ride he wants to do. “Do you think we’d be able to settle in a timely manner?” he asks.
With that, Hottman lifts her hands off the keyboard and peers up from the screen. Cyclists who consider hiring Hottman don’t always know about her out-of-office activities, which include a lot of educational work. She teaches bike-handling skills to beginners. She gives lectures to cops about relevant laws. She’s the coauthor of a forthcoming reference book that’s aimed at every attorney and judge in her field. Hottman has dissected cycling athletically, legally, and ethically, and she’s concluded that, while she dearly loves her two-wheeled brothers and sisters, riders don’t always display sound judgment.
“I’m not pro-cyclist all the time,” Hottman told me when we first spoke months earlier. “I get frustrated when I see riders behaving badly.” (...)
In her office, in the courtroom, in the news, on the Web, and on city streets and country roads, Megan Hottman encounters various species of the same genus: riders who are sure they’ve been wronged and simultaneously believe that cyclists are always right.
Often as not, they have been wronged, but Hottman consistently quotes a statistic that many riders don’t know or choose to ignore: roughly 47 percent of all bike-car mishaps happen because riders are at fault. That figure is debatable—there’s no national database, and Hottman’s use of it derives from small-sample studies, media accounts, and her own experience working on cases over the years. Still, there’s no doubt that riders often behave recklessly on roads and highways. Ask any driver who’s seen them blow through red lights or come screaming the wrong direction down one-way streets.
A particularly sour moment for cycling’s image occurred last September in New York City’s Central Park, when Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two, stepped off a curb and into the path of 31-year-old Harlem cyclist Jason Marshall, who was swerving around other pedestrians and reportedly in an aerodynamic tuck when he hit her. Three days later, Tarlov, the wife of a CBS senior vice president, died from severe head trauma. Marshall, who told reporters that the collision was “unavoidable,” hasn’t been charged with a crime.
In San Francisco in March of 2012, cyclist Chris Bucchere killed an elderly pedestrian in the city’s Castro district, hitting him after running multiple stop signs. According to a report on the mishap in the San Francisco Chronicle, three other pedestrians had been mowed down in the Bay Area in the past year. Bucchere ultimately pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.
We all know that motorists can be reckless and myopic as well, and statistically they may be at fault in car-bike accidents nearly half the time. When drivers screw up or drive too aggressively—or with outright malice—the consequences are usually dire for bicyclists because of the harsh realities of physics. Cars are massive metal beasts; bikes are not. When collisions happen, bikes and their riders get the worst of it, regardless of who’s at fault.
by Andrew Tilin, Outside | Read more:
Image: John Haynes
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Nap Like a Pro
Growing up, sleep was considered paramount in my family home. My siblings and I didn’t have many house rules – bedtimes were flexible, we had free reign over microwaved TV dinners (this was the 1980s), and video games. But one thing was always crystal clear: we couldn’t disturb an adult, or another kid, who was taking a nap.
As I got older, I was in for a rude awakening. Apparently, society looks down upon napping in the adult working world. But evidence is growing that napping can produce cognitive benefits from increased alertness to improved motor skills, perception and memory consolidation. So how do you get the best from a brief bit of shuteye? (...)
In a study published in 2008, the University of California’s Sara Mednick – author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life – and her colleagues compared the benefits of 200mg of caffeine (about the amount in a cup of coffee) with a 60 to 90 minute daytime nap on various memory tasks. They found that a nap generally improved memory performance, while caffeine either didn’t affect – or worsened – performance. The researchers suggest that caffeine blocks consolidation of new material into long-term memory by increasing levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in the hippocampus (the same neurotransmitter that naturally decreases during slow wave sleep).
The promised benefits of sleep have even persuaded a few firms to allow their employees to nap at work. Earlier this year, software companyHubSpot designed a napping room in its Massachusetts office that features a hammock and dim lighting. Employees are free to book the space without limitations.
According to HubSpot’s Alison Elworthy, the policy is a huge success, especially helpful for new parents who are making up for disrupted sleep at night, or employees recovering from jetlag. “People are really excited to use it and haven’t abused the policy at all,” she says.
Other firms have had less success. Earlier this year, BBC Capital reported that napping policies led to slacking off and procrastination at some companies, and a 30% drop in productivity at one Toronto-based tech start-up.
Even so, Mednick claims that about 40% of the population are habitual nappers – meaning they feel the need for, and benefit from, a regular afternoon snooze. So if you’re a natural napper (and I am), what is the most effective way to nap?
The best way to nap
According to researchers, the most natural time to take a nap, based on our circadian rhythms, is in the afternoon sometime between 2 and 4pm. Mednick even designed a napping wheel that pinpoints the ideal time to snooze, when a nap would contain a good balanced of slow wave and REM sleep. This balance typically occurs six to eight hours after waking. (...)
But the best way to nap also depends on what kind of effects you’re looking for. In a 2009 study, Mednick and her colleagues compared the effects of REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and quiet rest (while awake) on creative problem-solving. On the morning of the test, students were given a task in which they had to come up with a word that is associated with three apparently unrelated words – for instance ‘falling’, ‘actor’ and ‘dust’ can all be associated with the word ‘star’. Early in the afternoon, the students either took an REM nap, a non-REM nap or spent time resting while awake. When they returned in the evening to repeat versions of the morning’s test, the students who had taken the REM naps performed the best. In other words, it seems that REM can enhance creative problem solving.
“So if you’re looking for a restorative nap, you should sleep later in the day when you have an increased amount of slow wave sleep,” says Mednick, “And if you’re looking for a nap that might aid your creativity, you should sleep earlier in the day when you experience more REM.” (...)
But getting REM sleep also means having to sleep for longer – about 60-90 minutes – because it is the last stage of the sleep cycle. Short naps can have benefits too, though.
by Tiffanie Wen, BBC | Read more:
Image: Thinkstock
As I got older, I was in for a rude awakening. Apparently, society looks down upon napping in the adult working world. But evidence is growing that napping can produce cognitive benefits from increased alertness to improved motor skills, perception and memory consolidation. So how do you get the best from a brief bit of shuteye? (...)
In a study published in 2008, the University of California’s Sara Mednick – author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life – and her colleagues compared the benefits of 200mg of caffeine (about the amount in a cup of coffee) with a 60 to 90 minute daytime nap on various memory tasks. They found that a nap generally improved memory performance, while caffeine either didn’t affect – or worsened – performance. The researchers suggest that caffeine blocks consolidation of new material into long-term memory by increasing levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in the hippocampus (the same neurotransmitter that naturally decreases during slow wave sleep).The promised benefits of sleep have even persuaded a few firms to allow their employees to nap at work. Earlier this year, software companyHubSpot designed a napping room in its Massachusetts office that features a hammock and dim lighting. Employees are free to book the space without limitations.
According to HubSpot’s Alison Elworthy, the policy is a huge success, especially helpful for new parents who are making up for disrupted sleep at night, or employees recovering from jetlag. “People are really excited to use it and haven’t abused the policy at all,” she says.
Other firms have had less success. Earlier this year, BBC Capital reported that napping policies led to slacking off and procrastination at some companies, and a 30% drop in productivity at one Toronto-based tech start-up.
Even so, Mednick claims that about 40% of the population are habitual nappers – meaning they feel the need for, and benefit from, a regular afternoon snooze. So if you’re a natural napper (and I am), what is the most effective way to nap?
The best way to nap
According to researchers, the most natural time to take a nap, based on our circadian rhythms, is in the afternoon sometime between 2 and 4pm. Mednick even designed a napping wheel that pinpoints the ideal time to snooze, when a nap would contain a good balanced of slow wave and REM sleep. This balance typically occurs six to eight hours after waking. (...)
But the best way to nap also depends on what kind of effects you’re looking for. In a 2009 study, Mednick and her colleagues compared the effects of REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and quiet rest (while awake) on creative problem-solving. On the morning of the test, students were given a task in which they had to come up with a word that is associated with three apparently unrelated words – for instance ‘falling’, ‘actor’ and ‘dust’ can all be associated with the word ‘star’. Early in the afternoon, the students either took an REM nap, a non-REM nap or spent time resting while awake. When they returned in the evening to repeat versions of the morning’s test, the students who had taken the REM naps performed the best. In other words, it seems that REM can enhance creative problem solving.
“So if you’re looking for a restorative nap, you should sleep later in the day when you have an increased amount of slow wave sleep,” says Mednick, “And if you’re looking for a nap that might aid your creativity, you should sleep earlier in the day when you experience more REM.” (...)
But getting REM sleep also means having to sleep for longer – about 60-90 minutes – because it is the last stage of the sleep cycle. Short naps can have benefits too, though.
by Tiffanie Wen, BBC | Read more:
Image: Thinkstock
The Internet’s Hidden Science Factory
In a small apartment in a small town in northeastern Mississippi, Sarah Marshall sits at her computer, clicking bubbles for an online survey, as her 1-year-old son plays nearby. She hasn’t done this exact survey before, but the questions are familiar, and she works fast. That’s because Marshall is what you might call a professional survey-taker. In the past five years, she has completed roughly 20,000 academic surveys. This is her 21st so far this week. And it’s only Tuesday.
Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task. The work has been called microlabor, and the jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, range wildly. Some are tedious: transcribing interviews or cropping photos. Some are funny: prank calling someone’s buddy (that’s worth $1) or writing the title to a pornographic movie based on a collection of dirty screen grabs (6 cents). And others are downright bizarre. One task, for example, asked workers to strap live fish to their chests and upload the photos. That paid $5 — a lot by Mechanical Turk standards.
Mostly, Marshall is a sort of cyber guinea pig, providing a steady stream of data to academic research. This places her squarely inside a growing culture of super-savvy, highly experienced study participants.
As she works, she hears a rustling noise. “Grayson, are you in my garbage can?”
In the kitchen, the trash can’s on its side. Her son has liberated an empty box of cinnamon rolls and dumped the remaining contents on the floor. She goes to him, scoops him up and carries him back to the living room, where he circles the carpet, chattering happily as she resumes typing.
“I’m never going to be absolutely undistracted, ever,” Marshall says, and smiles.
Her employers don’t know that Marshall works while negotiating her toddler’s milk bottles and giving him hugs. They don’t know that she has seen studies similar to theirs maybe hundreds, possibly thousands, of times.
Since its founding in 2005, Mechanical Turk has become an increasingly popular way for university researchers to recruit subjects for online experiments. It’s cheap, easy to use, and the responses, powered by the forum’s 500,000 or so workers, flood in fast.
These factors are such a draw for researchers that, in certain academic fields, crowdsourced workers are outpacing psychology students — the traditional go-to study subjects. And the studies are a huge draw for many workers, who tend to participate again and again and again.
These aren’t obscure studies that Turkers are feeding. They span dozens of fields of research, including social, cognitive and clinical psychology, economics, political science and medicine. They teach us about human behavior. They deal in subjects like energy conservation, adolescent alcohol use, managing money and developing effective teaching methods.
“Most of what’s happening in these studies involves trying to understand human behavior,” said Yale University’s David Rand. “Understanding bias and prejudice, and how you make financial decisions, and how you make decisions generally that involve taking risks, that kind of thing. And there are often very clear policy implications.”
As the use of online crowdsourcing in research continues to grow, some are asking the question: How reliable are the data that these modern-day research subjects generate?
Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task. The work has been called microlabor, and the jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, range wildly. Some are tedious: transcribing interviews or cropping photos. Some are funny: prank calling someone’s buddy (that’s worth $1) or writing the title to a pornographic movie based on a collection of dirty screen grabs (6 cents). And others are downright bizarre. One task, for example, asked workers to strap live fish to their chests and upload the photos. That paid $5 — a lot by Mechanical Turk standards.Mostly, Marshall is a sort of cyber guinea pig, providing a steady stream of data to academic research. This places her squarely inside a growing culture of super-savvy, highly experienced study participants.
As she works, she hears a rustling noise. “Grayson, are you in my garbage can?”
In the kitchen, the trash can’s on its side. Her son has liberated an empty box of cinnamon rolls and dumped the remaining contents on the floor. She goes to him, scoops him up and carries him back to the living room, where he circles the carpet, chattering happily as she resumes typing.
“I’m never going to be absolutely undistracted, ever,” Marshall says, and smiles.
Her employers don’t know that Marshall works while negotiating her toddler’s milk bottles and giving him hugs. They don’t know that she has seen studies similar to theirs maybe hundreds, possibly thousands, of times.
Since its founding in 2005, Mechanical Turk has become an increasingly popular way for university researchers to recruit subjects for online experiments. It’s cheap, easy to use, and the responses, powered by the forum’s 500,000 or so workers, flood in fast.
These factors are such a draw for researchers that, in certain academic fields, crowdsourced workers are outpacing psychology students — the traditional go-to study subjects. And the studies are a huge draw for many workers, who tend to participate again and again and again.
These aren’t obscure studies that Turkers are feeding. They span dozens of fields of research, including social, cognitive and clinical psychology, economics, political science and medicine. They teach us about human behavior. They deal in subjects like energy conservation, adolescent alcohol use, managing money and developing effective teaching methods.
“Most of what’s happening in these studies involves trying to understand human behavior,” said Yale University’s David Rand. “Understanding bias and prejudice, and how you make financial decisions, and how you make decisions generally that involve taking risks, that kind of thing. And there are often very clear policy implications.”
As the use of online crowdsourcing in research continues to grow, some are asking the question: How reliable are the data that these modern-day research subjects generate?
by Jenny Marder, PBS Newshour | Read more:
Image: Edel Rodriguez
Monday, February 16, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Saturday, February 14, 2015
How We Write About Love
A few months ago, I read several articles touting the health benefits of writing in a deeply personal way. Studies had shown that writing introspectively on a regular basis can lead to lowered blood pressure, improved liver function and even the accelerated healing of postoperative wounds. The study’s subjects had been told to write for short periods each day about turbulent emotional experiences.
I bet a lot of them wrote about love. As the editor of this column, I have spent much of the last decade reading stories of people’s turbulent emotional experiences. They all involved love in one way or another.
Which isn’t so surprising. Who hasn’t been stirred up by love? But these writers had spun their experiences into stories and sent them here, where more than 99 percent must be turned away.
Although the would-be contributors may be happy to learn of the surprising health benefits of their writing, I think they hoped for a more glamorous reward than improved liver function.
Lately I have been thinking about those tens of thousands of passed-over stories and all the questions and lessons about love they represent. When taken together, what does all this writing reveal about us, or about love? Here’s what I have found.
First, and most basic: How we write about love depends on how old we are.
The young overwhelmingly write with a mixture of anxiety and hope. Their stories ask: What is it going to be for me?
Those in midlife are more often driven to their keyboards by feelings of malaise and disillusionment. Their stories ask: Is this really what it is for me?
And older people almost always write from a place of appreciation, regardless of how difficult things may be. Their message: All things considered, I feel pretty lucky.
In writing about love, the story of how we met looms large because a lot of us believe, validly or not, that a good meeting story bodes well for the relationship.
What do we consider to be a good meeting story? When it involves chance more than effort. You get bonus points if the chance encounter suggests compatibility, like mistakenly wheeling off with each other’s shopping carts at Whole Foods because your items had so much overlap, you got the carts mixed up.
“I get those beets all the time!” “You like Erewhon Supergrains, too?”
Pretty soon it’s time to get a room.
It seems the harder we work at finding love, the more prone we are to second-guessing the results. High-volume online daters worry about this, along with those who routinely attend singles events.
The fear is we may force things or compromise after pushing so hard for so long. We may admire hard work in most endeavors, but we admire laziness when it comes to finding love. (If you manage to stay together over the long haul, however, it will be because of effort, not chance.)
When some people write about love, they can’t find the right words to capture the intensity of their feelings, so they rely on stock terms that are best avoided. These include (but are not limited to): amazing, gorgeous, devastating, crushed, smitten, soul mate and electrifying.
Popular phrases include: “meet cute,” “heart pounded,” “heart melted,” “I’ll always remember,” “I’ll never forget” and “Reader, I married him.” Then there is everyone’s favorite stock word regardless of subject: literally. As in, “our date was literally electrifying.”
Women and men may feel love similarly, but they write about it differently.
A lot of men’s stories seem tinged by regret and nostalgia. They wish previous relationships hadn’t ended or romantic opportunities hadn’t slipped away. They lament not having been more emotionally open with lovers, wives, parents and children.
Women are more inclined to write with restlessness. They want to figure love out. Many keep mental lists of their expectations, detailing the characteristics of their hoped-for partner with alarming specificity and then evaluating how a new romantic interest does or doesn’t match that type.
They write something like, “I always pictured myself with someone taller, a guy with cropped brown hair and wire-rim glasses who wears khakis or jeans, the kind of person who would bring me tea in bed and read the Sunday paper with me on the couch.”
Men almost never describe the characteristics of their ideal partner in this way. Even if they have a specific picture in mind, few will put that vision to paper. I wonder if they’re embarrassed to.
I bet a lot of them wrote about love. As the editor of this column, I have spent much of the last decade reading stories of people’s turbulent emotional experiences. They all involved love in one way or another.
Which isn’t so surprising. Who hasn’t been stirred up by love? But these writers had spun their experiences into stories and sent them here, where more than 99 percent must be turned away.Although the would-be contributors may be happy to learn of the surprising health benefits of their writing, I think they hoped for a more glamorous reward than improved liver function.
Lately I have been thinking about those tens of thousands of passed-over stories and all the questions and lessons about love they represent. When taken together, what does all this writing reveal about us, or about love? Here’s what I have found.
First, and most basic: How we write about love depends on how old we are.
The young overwhelmingly write with a mixture of anxiety and hope. Their stories ask: What is it going to be for me?
Those in midlife are more often driven to their keyboards by feelings of malaise and disillusionment. Their stories ask: Is this really what it is for me?
And older people almost always write from a place of appreciation, regardless of how difficult things may be. Their message: All things considered, I feel pretty lucky.
In writing about love, the story of how we met looms large because a lot of us believe, validly or not, that a good meeting story bodes well for the relationship.
What do we consider to be a good meeting story? When it involves chance more than effort. You get bonus points if the chance encounter suggests compatibility, like mistakenly wheeling off with each other’s shopping carts at Whole Foods because your items had so much overlap, you got the carts mixed up.
“I get those beets all the time!” “You like Erewhon Supergrains, too?”
Pretty soon it’s time to get a room.
It seems the harder we work at finding love, the more prone we are to second-guessing the results. High-volume online daters worry about this, along with those who routinely attend singles events.
The fear is we may force things or compromise after pushing so hard for so long. We may admire hard work in most endeavors, but we admire laziness when it comes to finding love. (If you manage to stay together over the long haul, however, it will be because of effort, not chance.)
When some people write about love, they can’t find the right words to capture the intensity of their feelings, so they rely on stock terms that are best avoided. These include (but are not limited to): amazing, gorgeous, devastating, crushed, smitten, soul mate and electrifying.
Popular phrases include: “meet cute,” “heart pounded,” “heart melted,” “I’ll always remember,” “I’ll never forget” and “Reader, I married him.” Then there is everyone’s favorite stock word regardless of subject: literally. As in, “our date was literally electrifying.”
Women and men may feel love similarly, but they write about it differently.
A lot of men’s stories seem tinged by regret and nostalgia. They wish previous relationships hadn’t ended or romantic opportunities hadn’t slipped away. They lament not having been more emotionally open with lovers, wives, parents and children.
Women are more inclined to write with restlessness. They want to figure love out. Many keep mental lists of their expectations, detailing the characteristics of their hoped-for partner with alarming specificity and then evaluating how a new romantic interest does or doesn’t match that type.
They write something like, “I always pictured myself with someone taller, a guy with cropped brown hair and wire-rim glasses who wears khakis or jeans, the kind of person who would bring me tea in bed and read the Sunday paper with me on the couch.”
Men almost never describe the characteristics of their ideal partner in this way. Even if they have a specific picture in mind, few will put that vision to paper. I wonder if they’re embarrassed to.
by Daniel Jones, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Rea
To a Friend, On His Divorce
You were 7 and I was 6 when we met near the jungle gym. After becoming bandmates in high school and enjoying a brief twinkle of local stardom, we became men and did man things, one of which was each finding someone we loved enough to marry. I have proof that both of us were happy then. The photos from our weddings show us laughing, smiling, greeting friends and relatives, eating cake, smoking cigars and dancing.
It was impossible to imagine, in the face of all that merriment, that one day our respective unions would begin to crack, the crack would become a fissure and the fissure would become a total collapse. Everyone reads the grim divorce statistics. Our mothers and fathers had marriages that failed. But that wouldn’t happen to us. We were bright, we were young and most of all, we were sure of our brides.
There was no one else in the world for me back then but my love. We were partners, friends, lovers, and when life was full of death, job loss, car wrecks and money struggles, we stuck together. Sometimes I’d watch her while she slept and think, “I don’t know what I would do if I had to live without you.” We made a pact that we’d both die together, in our sleep, at the same time, arms folded across chests, so neither of us would have to face the world without the other.
I saw it coming before she did. The money ran low; then it ran out; then every month was a struggle. Both of us knuckled down and worked harder. We also both sought and found therapy, but neither of us had therapists who were geniuses, and nothing really changed. What I choose to focus on now is the memory of when things were wonderful, and they were wonderful for a good 12 years.
So now you tell me you are going to a mediator to work out the details of your divorce, and I feel what it must have been like for you when I told you my seemingly unshakable marriage to a wonderful woman — who is still wonderful — was over. Now I have an idea what all our mutual friends went through watching us fall apart. “Oh, man — can’t you work it out?” The answer is, No, you can’t — no one else lives with your spouse, and no one else has any idea how often you fight, stew or go to bed lonely. Both you and I hung in there until it was spoiled milk, and there isn’t a thing you can do with spoiled milk except dump it down the drain.
Now I’m going to tell you what your life will be like when you pack your stuff and move out of the house. For me, that came in 2012.
At first it will be a huge relief. You’ll have no idea until it actually happens what it’s like to live a life with no one to argue with, and brother, it is sweet. You’ll wonder why you didn’t do this before — just go away by yourself for a while, get back in touch with your essence. You’ll forget that you didn’t do it because you didn’t even have money to buy a banana, forget a man-cave — and you also, like me, took your marriage vows seriously. For now, though, sweet relief.
But soon, there by yourself, the fact that a good part of your life is over and you’re just scraping by will greet you every day; that despite your obvious skills and smarts and ambition, you failed to make your 20s and 30s and 40s into some kind of mighty empire. You’ll discover the world isn’t necessarily rushing to greet older divorced men. You’ll see other guys around your new town, guys who have either divorced or never married, and they in turn will recognize you, noting that you have no one next to you as you shop, get your car fixed, play gigs with your band or visit coffee shops.
These guys have semi-old faces and bodies, and you’ll soon realize with a great shock that you have a semi-old face and body, too. You won’t be in any kind of emotional shape to meet a woman to share your breakfast and your bed right away, either — single available women who don’t have serious emotional problems or substance issues aren’t looking for recently divorced dudes. But even if you had a sweet car, a swank crib and some spending cash, it’d still be rough going. Here’s why.
It was impossible to imagine, in the face of all that merriment, that one day our respective unions would begin to crack, the crack would become a fissure and the fissure would become a total collapse. Everyone reads the grim divorce statistics. Our mothers and fathers had marriages that failed. But that wouldn’t happen to us. We were bright, we were young and most of all, we were sure of our brides.
There was no one else in the world for me back then but my love. We were partners, friends, lovers, and when life was full of death, job loss, car wrecks and money struggles, we stuck together. Sometimes I’d watch her while she slept and think, “I don’t know what I would do if I had to live without you.” We made a pact that we’d both die together, in our sleep, at the same time, arms folded across chests, so neither of us would have to face the world without the other.I saw it coming before she did. The money ran low; then it ran out; then every month was a struggle. Both of us knuckled down and worked harder. We also both sought and found therapy, but neither of us had therapists who were geniuses, and nothing really changed. What I choose to focus on now is the memory of when things were wonderful, and they were wonderful for a good 12 years.
So now you tell me you are going to a mediator to work out the details of your divorce, and I feel what it must have been like for you when I told you my seemingly unshakable marriage to a wonderful woman — who is still wonderful — was over. Now I have an idea what all our mutual friends went through watching us fall apart. “Oh, man — can’t you work it out?” The answer is, No, you can’t — no one else lives with your spouse, and no one else has any idea how often you fight, stew or go to bed lonely. Both you and I hung in there until it was spoiled milk, and there isn’t a thing you can do with spoiled milk except dump it down the drain.
Now I’m going to tell you what your life will be like when you pack your stuff and move out of the house. For me, that came in 2012.
At first it will be a huge relief. You’ll have no idea until it actually happens what it’s like to live a life with no one to argue with, and brother, it is sweet. You’ll wonder why you didn’t do this before — just go away by yourself for a while, get back in touch with your essence. You’ll forget that you didn’t do it because you didn’t even have money to buy a banana, forget a man-cave — and you also, like me, took your marriage vows seriously. For now, though, sweet relief.
But soon, there by yourself, the fact that a good part of your life is over and you’re just scraping by will greet you every day; that despite your obvious skills and smarts and ambition, you failed to make your 20s and 30s and 40s into some kind of mighty empire. You’ll discover the world isn’t necessarily rushing to greet older divorced men. You’ll see other guys around your new town, guys who have either divorced or never married, and they in turn will recognize you, noting that you have no one next to you as you shop, get your car fixed, play gigs with your band or visit coffee shops.
These guys have semi-old faces and bodies, and you’ll soon realize with a great shock that you have a semi-old face and body, too. You won’t be in any kind of emotional shape to meet a woman to share your breakfast and your bed right away, either — single available women who don’t have serious emotional problems or substance issues aren’t looking for recently divorced dudes. But even if you had a sweet car, a swank crib and some spending cash, it’d still be rough going. Here’s why.
by Josh Max, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tim Lahan
Friday, February 13, 2015
The Future of the Web Is 100 Years Old
“There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web,” declared a 1992 foundational document from the World Wide Web Consortium—meaning that there is no central server or organizational authority to determine what does or does not get published. It is, like Borges’ famous Library of Babel, theoretically infinite, stitched together with hyperlinks rather than top-down, Dewey Decimal-style categories.1 It is also famously open—built atop a set of publicly available industry standards.
While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way?
The web has played such a powerful role in shaping our world that it can sometimes seem like a fait accompli—the inevitable result of progress and enlightened thinking. A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web.
By the late 19th century, the modern information age had already begun. The industrialization of the printing press, coupled with the introduction of cheap rag paper, had dramatically altered the economics of publishing. Much of Europe and North America was awash in data. Daily newspapers, cheap magazines, and mass-market novels all emerged during this period, along with a flurry of institutional reports, memos, and all kinds of other printed ephemera.
Meanwhile, new communications technologies like the telegraph and telephone were cropping up. Tram and railway lines were proliferating. An increasingly internationalized postal service sped the flow of data around the globe. By 1900, a global information network had already started to take shape.
The industrial information explosion triggered waves of concern about how to manage all that data. Accomplished librarians like Melvil Dewey (of Decimal System fame), Sir Anthony Panizzi of the British Library, and Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum all began devising new systems to cope with the complexity of their burgeoning collections. In the fast-growing corporate world, company archivists started to develop complex filing systems to accommodate the sudden deluge of typewritten documents.
While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way?
The web has played such a powerful role in shaping our world that it can sometimes seem like a fait accompli—the inevitable result of progress and enlightened thinking. A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web.
By the late 19th century, the modern information age had already begun. The industrialization of the printing press, coupled with the introduction of cheap rag paper, had dramatically altered the economics of publishing. Much of Europe and North America was awash in data. Daily newspapers, cheap magazines, and mass-market novels all emerged during this period, along with a flurry of institutional reports, memos, and all kinds of other printed ephemera.Meanwhile, new communications technologies like the telegraph and telephone were cropping up. Tram and railway lines were proliferating. An increasingly internationalized postal service sped the flow of data around the globe. By 1900, a global information network had already started to take shape.
The industrial information explosion triggered waves of concern about how to manage all that data. Accomplished librarians like Melvil Dewey (of Decimal System fame), Sir Anthony Panizzi of the British Library, and Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum all began devising new systems to cope with the complexity of their burgeoning collections. In the fast-growing corporate world, company archivists started to develop complex filing systems to accommodate the sudden deluge of typewritten documents.
Among these efforts, one stood out. In 1893, a young Belgian lawyer named Paul Otlet wrote an essay expressing his concern over the rapid proliferation of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. The problem, he argued, should be “alarming to those who are concerned about quality rather than quantity,” and he worried about how anyone would ever make sense of it all. An ardent bibliophile with an entrepreneurial streak, he began working on a solution with his partner, a fellow lawyer named Henri La Fontaine (who would later go on to join the Belgian Senate and win the Nobel Peace Prize): a “Universal Bibliography” (Repertoire bibliographique universel) that would catalog all the world’s published information and make it freely accessible.
The project won Otlet and La Fontaine a Grand Prize at the Paris World Expo of 1900, and attracted funding from the Belgian government. It would eventually encompass more than 16 million entries ranging from books and periodicals to newspapers, photographs, posters, and audio and video recordings, all painstakingly recorded on individual index cards. Otlet even established an international network of associations and a vast museum called the World Palace (Palais Mondial) or Mundaneum, which at one point occupied more than 100 rooms in a government building.
Otlet’s Mundaneum presented an alternative vision to today’s (nominally) flat and open web by relying on a high degree of bibliographical control. He envisioned a group of trained indexers managing the flow of information in and out of the system, making sure that every incoming piece of data would be properly categorized and synthesized into a coherent body of knowledge. To this end, he and La Fontaine developed a sophisticated cataloging system that they dubbed the Universal Decimal Classification. Using the Dewey Decimal System as its starting point, it started with a few top-level domains (like Philosophy, Social Sciences, and The Arts), which could then be further divided into a theoretically infinite number of sub-topics. This in itself was nothing new, but Otlet introduced an important new twist: a set of so-called “auxiliary tables” that allowed indexers to connect one topic to another by using a combination of numeric codes and familiar marks like the equal sign, plus sign, colon, and quotation marks. So, for example, the code 339.5 (410/44) denoted “Trade relations between the United Kingdom and France,” while 311:[622+669](485) meant “Statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden.”
Otlet hoped that this new system would allow for a grand unification of human knowledge, and entirely new forms of information. But neither he nor his Mundaneum survived the ravages of World War II. After invading Brussels, the Nazis destroyed much of his life’s work, removing more than 70 tons worth of material and repurposing the World Palace site for an exhibition of Third Reich art. Otlet died in 1944, and has remained largely forgotten ever since. (...)
All of these proposals were, first and foremost, managed systems, closely curated collections of knowledge that would have required a high degree of systematic control. And for the most part, they were situated squarely in the public sector, with little role for private enterprise. They emerged in an era of industrialization, when many writers saw great hope in the possibilities of scientific management to improve the human condition; and in a time of war, when many thinkers hoped that a more orderly system would serve as a bulwark against the possibility of international conflict.
In other words, the dream of organizing the world’s information stemmed not from an authoritarian impulse, but from a deeply utopian one. In the United States, though, a very different kind of utopia was being imagined.
The project won Otlet and La Fontaine a Grand Prize at the Paris World Expo of 1900, and attracted funding from the Belgian government. It would eventually encompass more than 16 million entries ranging from books and periodicals to newspapers, photographs, posters, and audio and video recordings, all painstakingly recorded on individual index cards. Otlet even established an international network of associations and a vast museum called the World Palace (Palais Mondial) or Mundaneum, which at one point occupied more than 100 rooms in a government building.
Otlet’s Mundaneum presented an alternative vision to today’s (nominally) flat and open web by relying on a high degree of bibliographical control. He envisioned a group of trained indexers managing the flow of information in and out of the system, making sure that every incoming piece of data would be properly categorized and synthesized into a coherent body of knowledge. To this end, he and La Fontaine developed a sophisticated cataloging system that they dubbed the Universal Decimal Classification. Using the Dewey Decimal System as its starting point, it started with a few top-level domains (like Philosophy, Social Sciences, and The Arts), which could then be further divided into a theoretically infinite number of sub-topics. This in itself was nothing new, but Otlet introduced an important new twist: a set of so-called “auxiliary tables” that allowed indexers to connect one topic to another by using a combination of numeric codes and familiar marks like the equal sign, plus sign, colon, and quotation marks. So, for example, the code 339.5 (410/44) denoted “Trade relations between the United Kingdom and France,” while 311:[622+669](485) meant “Statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden.”
Otlet hoped that this new system would allow for a grand unification of human knowledge, and entirely new forms of information. But neither he nor his Mundaneum survived the ravages of World War II. After invading Brussels, the Nazis destroyed much of his life’s work, removing more than 70 tons worth of material and repurposing the World Palace site for an exhibition of Third Reich art. Otlet died in 1944, and has remained largely forgotten ever since. (...)
All of these proposals were, first and foremost, managed systems, closely curated collections of knowledge that would have required a high degree of systematic control. And for the most part, they were situated squarely in the public sector, with little role for private enterprise. They emerged in an era of industrialization, when many writers saw great hope in the possibilities of scientific management to improve the human condition; and in a time of war, when many thinkers hoped that a more orderly system would serve as a bulwark against the possibility of international conflict.
In other words, the dream of organizing the world’s information stemmed not from an authoritarian impulse, but from a deeply utopian one. In the United States, though, a very different kind of utopia was being imagined.
by Alex Wright, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Pete Ryan
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