[ed. Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. ~ Langston Hughes, Theme for English B.]
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Monday, November 23, 2015
De-Stigmatizing Hawaii’s Pidgin English
“You don’t know how happy this makes me,” I wrote a colleague after she casually sent me a link to a recent news story reporting that the U.S. Census Bureau now recognizes Hawaiian Pidgin English as a language. “Oh really?!” the colleague responded, surprised at my excitement.
After all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources—albeit imperfect ones—have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!?
The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language—to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems—from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English—may even see similar changes one day, too.
I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. It was through this reporting experience—the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms—that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language; I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”—“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state.
Pidgin, according to linguists, is a creole language that reflects Hawaii’s ongoing legacy as a cultural melting pot. Hawaiian Pidgin English developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate. That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language. To give you a sense of what Pidgin sounds like, this is how a project about of the University of Hawaii known as Da Pidgin Coup describes this history using the language:
According to linguists, the many people in Hawaii who speak both Pidgin and conventional English—whether it be 1,600 people or 700,000—are actually bilingual. “If you don’t treat it as a language, then you get all kinds of problems that come with the stigma,” Kent Sakoda, a professor of second language studies at the University of Hawaii who’s written a book on Pidgin grammar, has explained.
But critics didn’t—and don’t—see it that way. They say allowing it in school undermines kids’ prospects in a globalized workforce, with many citing Hawaii students’ below-average writing and reading scores. This has been a long-standing view, and the state Board of Education even sought to outlaw Pidgin in schools in the late 1980s, though pushback from the community prevented that from happening. “If you use Pidgin, it can really affect your grammar,” former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who spoke the language growing up, once told me. “I think it does the kids a disservice if you allow them to continue to speak Pidgin.” (...)
When I asked Laiana Wong, a Hawaiian languages professor, whether speaking Pidgin puts kids at a disadvantage, he said that, given the way I had “couched the question, it’s obvious that we recognize that Pidgin is the subaltern language and English has got superiority.”
“Now,” he continued, “if we turn that around and say, well, what about the person who speaks a more standard form of English who cannot speak Pidgin—are they handicapped in Hawaii? And I say yes.”
After all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources—albeit imperfect ones—have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!?
The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language—to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems—from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English—may even see similar changes one day, too.I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. It was through this reporting experience—the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms—that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language; I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”—“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state.
Pidgin, according to linguists, is a creole language that reflects Hawaii’s ongoing legacy as a cultural melting pot. Hawaiian Pidgin English developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate. That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language. To give you a sense of what Pidgin sounds like, this is how a project about of the University of Hawaii known as Da Pidgin Coup describes this history using the language:
Wen da keiki wen come olda da language wen come into da creole dat linguist kine people call Hawai‘i Creole. Us local people we jus’ call um “Pidgin.” Nowadays kine Pidgin get all da stuff from da pas’ inside. Plenny of da vocabulary for Pidgin come from English but plenny stuff in da gramma come from Hawaiian. Cantonese an’ Portuguese wen also help make da gramma, an’ English, Hawaiian, Portuguese, an’ Japanese wen help da vocabulary da mos’.It may read like a phonetic interpretation of a really broken version of standard American English, but linguists insist it isn’t. It has its own grammatical system and lexicon; it doesn’t use “are” or “is” in sentences, for example, and incorporates words from an array of languages like “keiki,” which means children in Hawaiian. (...)
According to linguists, the many people in Hawaii who speak both Pidgin and conventional English—whether it be 1,600 people or 700,000—are actually bilingual. “If you don’t treat it as a language, then you get all kinds of problems that come with the stigma,” Kent Sakoda, a professor of second language studies at the University of Hawaii who’s written a book on Pidgin grammar, has explained.
But critics didn’t—and don’t—see it that way. They say allowing it in school undermines kids’ prospects in a globalized workforce, with many citing Hawaii students’ below-average writing and reading scores. This has been a long-standing view, and the state Board of Education even sought to outlaw Pidgin in schools in the late 1980s, though pushback from the community prevented that from happening. “If you use Pidgin, it can really affect your grammar,” former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who spoke the language growing up, once told me. “I think it does the kids a disservice if you allow them to continue to speak Pidgin.” (...)
When I asked Laiana Wong, a Hawaiian languages professor, whether speaking Pidgin puts kids at a disadvantage, he said that, given the way I had “couched the question, it’s obvious that we recognize that Pidgin is the subaltern language and English has got superiority.”
“Now,” he continued, “if we turn that around and say, well, what about the person who speaks a more standard form of English who cannot speak Pidgin—are they handicapped in Hawaii? And I say yes.”
by Alia Wong, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Sinco Kelleher / AP
The End of the Internet Dream
In 20 years, the Web might complete its shift from liberator to oppressor.
Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.
But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
To Reach Seniors, Tech Start-Ups Must First Relate to Them
Daily, breathless announcements arrive in my inbox, heralding technology products for older adults.
A “revolutionary” gait-training robot. An emergency response device said to predict falls. A combination home phone and tablet system that “transforms how older seniors connect with and are cared for by their loved ones.”
Daily, too, I hear tales of technology failing in various ways to do what older people or their worried families expect. I hear about frail elders who remove their emergency pendants at bedtime, then fall in the dark when they walk to the bathroom and can’t summon help.
About a 90-year-old in Sacramento who stored his never-worn emergency pendant in his refrigerator. About a Cambridge, Mass., daughter who has tried four or five telephones — not cellphones or smartphones, but ordinary landlines — in an ongoing effort to find one simple enough for her 95-year-old mother to reliably dial her number and have a conversation.
A “revolutionary” gait-training robot. An emergency response device said to predict falls. A combination home phone and tablet system that “transforms how older seniors connect with and are cared for by their loved ones.”
Daily, too, I hear tales of technology failing in various ways to do what older people or their worried families expect. I hear about frail elders who remove their emergency pendants at bedtime, then fall in the dark when they walk to the bathroom and can’t summon help.About a 90-year-old in Sacramento who stored his never-worn emergency pendant in his refrigerator. About a Cambridge, Mass., daughter who has tried four or five telephones — not cellphones or smartphones, but ordinary landlines — in an ongoing effort to find one simple enough for her 95-year-old mother to reliably dial her number and have a conversation.
Which scenario represents the likelier future for senior-oriented technology? It depends on whom you ask.
Entrepreneurs are hard at work developing platforms, apps, sites and devices meant to help older adults manage their health, live independently and maintain family and social connections, all laudable goals. Let’s call their efforts silvertech.
Until a few years ago, “the whole tech world wasn’t sufficiently focused on this enormous opportunity,” said Stephen Johnston, a co-founder of Aging2.0, which connects technology companies with the senior care industry. “It’s changing quite rapidly.” He estimated that 1,500 silvertech start-ups had arisen globally in the past three years.
A couple of recent developments have intensified American entrepreneurial interest, said Laurie Orlov, a business analyst who began the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog in 2008.
Last spring, a start-up called Honor, which matches older adults with vetted home care workers, raised $20 million in venture capital from prominent Silicon Valley investors. “That gave all kinds of organizations hope for market potential,” Ms. Orlov said.
In addition, Medicare has begun to broaden the kinds of remote health monitoring — a.k.a. telehealth — that it will cover, though so far only in rural areas or in a pilot program for accountable care organizations. Eventually, remote monitoring will be “the way people will stay out of emergency rooms and nursing homes,” Ms. Orlov predicted.
Yet Mr. Johnston, whose organization convenes pitch events for silvertech developers, acknowledges that “there have definitely been a few missteps, and there haven’t been too many huge wins yet.”
As a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ken Covinsky often hears from Silicon Valley tinkerers with big ideas. He has become something of a skeptic, as he pointed out in a post for the GeriPal blog last month.
“It’s incredibly well meaning,” he said in an interview. “But there are assumptions that are at odds with the problems our patients and families are facing.”
Tech people seem enamored, for example, with the prospect of continually monitoring older people using sensors that transmit information on when they get up, leave the house and open the refrigerator (or don’t).
Aside from the question of whether older adults appreciate such scrutiny, Dr. Covinsky suspects that an hour or two a day from a skilled home care worker (one paid more than minimum wage, he added) would do them more good.
“They don’t necessarily need someone to know when they open the fridge,” he said. “They need someone to make or deliver a good meal.” (...)
Design will play a crucial role in how useful consumers find any of these products, but it presents tricky questions. Do you come up with something specialized for older adults? “You don’t want to be handing smartphones with shiny glass to people with Parkinson’s disease or hand tremors or macular degeneration, and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Ms. Orlov cautioned.
Yet with some exceptions — the Jitterbug phone, for instance — products aimed purely at older adults have often faltered. Sometimes they’re too complex, or too difficult for those with dementia, which is a lot of people.
Or users may balk because the devices become an uncomfortably constant reminder of incapacity. Technology isn’t always the solution to a problem.
Entrepreneurs are hard at work developing platforms, apps, sites and devices meant to help older adults manage their health, live independently and maintain family and social connections, all laudable goals. Let’s call their efforts silvertech.
Until a few years ago, “the whole tech world wasn’t sufficiently focused on this enormous opportunity,” said Stephen Johnston, a co-founder of Aging2.0, which connects technology companies with the senior care industry. “It’s changing quite rapidly.” He estimated that 1,500 silvertech start-ups had arisen globally in the past three years.
A couple of recent developments have intensified American entrepreneurial interest, said Laurie Orlov, a business analyst who began the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog in 2008.
Last spring, a start-up called Honor, which matches older adults with vetted home care workers, raised $20 million in venture capital from prominent Silicon Valley investors. “That gave all kinds of organizations hope for market potential,” Ms. Orlov said.
In addition, Medicare has begun to broaden the kinds of remote health monitoring — a.k.a. telehealth — that it will cover, though so far only in rural areas or in a pilot program for accountable care organizations. Eventually, remote monitoring will be “the way people will stay out of emergency rooms and nursing homes,” Ms. Orlov predicted.
Yet Mr. Johnston, whose organization convenes pitch events for silvertech developers, acknowledges that “there have definitely been a few missteps, and there haven’t been too many huge wins yet.”
As a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ken Covinsky often hears from Silicon Valley tinkerers with big ideas. He has become something of a skeptic, as he pointed out in a post for the GeriPal blog last month.
“It’s incredibly well meaning,” he said in an interview. “But there are assumptions that are at odds with the problems our patients and families are facing.”
Tech people seem enamored, for example, with the prospect of continually monitoring older people using sensors that transmit information on when they get up, leave the house and open the refrigerator (or don’t).
Aside from the question of whether older adults appreciate such scrutiny, Dr. Covinsky suspects that an hour or two a day from a skilled home care worker (one paid more than minimum wage, he added) would do them more good.
“They don’t necessarily need someone to know when they open the fridge,” he said. “They need someone to make or deliver a good meal.” (...)
Design will play a crucial role in how useful consumers find any of these products, but it presents tricky questions. Do you come up with something specialized for older adults? “You don’t want to be handing smartphones with shiny glass to people with Parkinson’s disease or hand tremors or macular degeneration, and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Ms. Orlov cautioned.
Yet with some exceptions — the Jitterbug phone, for instance — products aimed purely at older adults have often faltered. Sometimes they’re too complex, or too difficult for those with dementia, which is a lot of people.
Or users may balk because the devices become an uncomfortably constant reminder of incapacity. Technology isn’t always the solution to a problem.
by Paula Span, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Luc Melanson
Sunday, November 22, 2015
The Woobie
A "woobie" is a name for any type of character who makes you feel extremely sorry for them. Basically, the first thing you think to say when you see the woobie is: "Aw, poor baby!" Woobification of a character is a curious, audience-driven phenomenon, sometimes divorced from the character's canonical morality.
A story with the Woobie allows the audience to vicariously experience relief from some pain by fantasizing about relieving the Woobie's pain. (No, not that way! Well, okay, sometimes.) Woobification can also tie into a disturbing hurt/comfort dynamic, in which fans enjoy seeing the Woobie tortured so they can wish the hurt away. This is often explored in Hurt/Comfort Fic.
An important aspect of the Woobie is that their suffering must be caused by external sources. A character who suffers as the result of their own actions is a Tragic Hero and does not qualify.
The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Sometimes a Woobie goes Omnicidal Maniac and seeks to destroy the world in a bid to make the pain stop, in which case you're dealing with a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Sometimes it's possible to bring such a woobie back from the edge, but other times, only his or her destruction in a Shoot the Dog moment will stop things.
In Lighter and Fluffier fiction, the Woobie can sometimes earn their happy ending.
by TV Tropes | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A story with the Woobie allows the audience to vicariously experience relief from some pain by fantasizing about relieving the Woobie's pain. (No, not that way! Well, okay, sometimes.) Woobification can also tie into a disturbing hurt/comfort dynamic, in which fans enjoy seeing the Woobie tortured so they can wish the hurt away. This is often explored in Hurt/Comfort Fic.An important aspect of the Woobie is that their suffering must be caused by external sources. A character who suffers as the result of their own actions is a Tragic Hero and does not qualify.
The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Sometimes a Woobie goes Omnicidal Maniac and seeks to destroy the world in a bid to make the pain stop, in which case you're dealing with a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Sometimes it's possible to bring such a woobie back from the edge, but other times, only his or her destruction in a Shoot the Dog moment will stop things.
In Lighter and Fluffier fiction, the Woobie can sometimes earn their happy ending.
by TV Tropes | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Bringing Up Genius
Is every healthy child a potential prodigy?
Before Laszlo Polgár conceived his children, before he even met his wife, he knew he was going to raise geniuses. He’d started to write a book about it. He saw it moves ahead.
By their first meeting, a dinner and walk around Budapest in 1965, Laszlo told Klara, his future bride, how his kids’ education would go. He had studied the lives of geniuses and divined a pattern: an adult singularly focused on the child’s success. He’d raise the kids outside school, with intense devotion to a subject, though he wasn’t sure what. "Every healthy child," as he liked to say, "is a potential genius." Genetics and talent would be no obstacle. And he’d do it with great love.
Fifty years later in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, I met one of Laszlo’s daughters, Susan Polgár, the first woman ever to earn the title of chess grandmaster. For several years, Susan had led the chess team of Webster University — a small residential college with a large international and online footprint — to consecutive national titles. Their spring break had just begun, and for the next few days, in a brick-and-glass former religious library turned chess hall, the team would drill for a four-team tournament in New York City to defend the title.
The students, sporting blue-and-yellow windbreakers and polos, huddled around a checked board of white and black, a queen, rook, and pawn stacked in a row. They had started with the King’s Indian Defense, a well-mapped terrain. Now they were in the midgame. Polgár sat to the side, behind a laptop synced to the game, algorithms whirring. What should be the next move? she asked. "Be active and concrete."
Jocular debate broke out, accents betraying origins: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Hungary. "This is not human," one student said. "It looks magical," said another. Computers have long since outclassed humans in chess; they’re vital in training, but their recommended moves can seem quixotic. "No, it’s very human," Polgár assured them. The students, most of them grandmasters, grew quiet, searching the more than 100,000 positional situations they had ingrained over their lifetimes, exploring possible moves and the future problems they implied — moving down the decision tree. It’s the knot at the heart of chess: Each turn, you must move; when you move, a world of potential vanishes.
"Bishop G4?"
"Bishop G4," Polgár confirmed.
"That’s not a human move!"
"It’s a human move," she said. "It’s actually very pretty." The arrangement is close to a strategy she used before, against her sister. "I beat Judit on that."
The students murmured. This demanded respect. Susan Polgár may be the first woman ever to earn the grandmaster title, but her younger sister is the best female chess player of all time.
There are three Polgár sisters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia), and Judit: all chess prodigies, raised by Laszlo and Klara in Budapest during the Cold War. Rearing them in modest conditions, where a walk to the stationery store was a great event, the Polgárs homeschooled their girls, defying a skeptical and chauvinist Communist system. They lived chess, often practicing for eight hours a day. By the end of the 1980s, the family had become a phenomenon: wealthy, stars in Hungary and, when they visited the United States, headline news.
The girls were not an experiment in any proper form. Laszlo knew that. There was no control. But soon enough, their story outgrew their lives. They became prime examples in a psychological debate that has existed for a century: Does success depend more on the accidents of genetics or the decisions of upbringing? Nature or nurture? In its most recent form, that debate has revolved around the position, advanced by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, that intense practice is the most dominant variable in success. The Polgárs would seem to suggest: Yes.
You may have heard of Ericsson. His work was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 best seller, Outliers, which spawned the notion of 10,000 hours of practice, in particular, as a mythical threshold to success. It’s a cultural fixture. Turn on the radio and you’ll hear a musician talking about "getting his 10,000 hours" in. This popularization also caused a backlash — documented in David Epstein’s book The Sports Gene and elsewhere — of researchers arguing that genetics and other factors are as important as practice. It’s a value-laden struggle, with precious few facts. In a globalized world where returns concentrate to top performers, research showing the primacy of practice is a hopeful, democratic message. "The scientific formulation of the American dream," as one psychologist told me. The Polgárs embody that hope. Is it a false hope? (...)
Equipped with celebrity and influence, Susan is an excellent recruiter. Many of her students are ranked higher than her; three have topped even Judit. Yet despite their great individual skill, the team members enjoy camaraderie. They visit the gym together. They’ve absorbed the Polgár way.
"Life and chess, they are similar in some points," Andre Diamant, a Brazilian graduate student and the team’s longest-tenured player, said during a break from practice. "Chess players know they need to study. They need to work. They need to improve. And they do that. In life, they have this same thing."
You’re probably nodding your head. Few would dismiss the value of hard work. But if there’s a snag to the Polgár method of success, it might arise from a simple question: Susan and her sisters had similar childhoods. So why was Judit so much better?
Before Laszlo Polgár conceived his children, before he even met his wife, he knew he was going to raise geniuses. He’d started to write a book about it. He saw it moves ahead.
By their first meeting, a dinner and walk around Budapest in 1965, Laszlo told Klara, his future bride, how his kids’ education would go. He had studied the lives of geniuses and divined a pattern: an adult singularly focused on the child’s success. He’d raise the kids outside school, with intense devotion to a subject, though he wasn’t sure what. "Every healthy child," as he liked to say, "is a potential genius." Genetics and talent would be no obstacle. And he’d do it with great love.
Fifty years later in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, I met one of Laszlo’s daughters, Susan Polgár, the first woman ever to earn the title of chess grandmaster. For several years, Susan had led the chess team of Webster University — a small residential college with a large international and online footprint — to consecutive national titles. Their spring break had just begun, and for the next few days, in a brick-and-glass former religious library turned chess hall, the team would drill for a four-team tournament in New York City to defend the title.The students, sporting blue-and-yellow windbreakers and polos, huddled around a checked board of white and black, a queen, rook, and pawn stacked in a row. They had started with the King’s Indian Defense, a well-mapped terrain. Now they were in the midgame. Polgár sat to the side, behind a laptop synced to the game, algorithms whirring. What should be the next move? she asked. "Be active and concrete."
Jocular debate broke out, accents betraying origins: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Hungary. "This is not human," one student said. "It looks magical," said another. Computers have long since outclassed humans in chess; they’re vital in training, but their recommended moves can seem quixotic. "No, it’s very human," Polgár assured them. The students, most of them grandmasters, grew quiet, searching the more than 100,000 positional situations they had ingrained over their lifetimes, exploring possible moves and the future problems they implied — moving down the decision tree. It’s the knot at the heart of chess: Each turn, you must move; when you move, a world of potential vanishes.
"Bishop G4?"
"Bishop G4," Polgár confirmed.
"That’s not a human move!"
"It’s a human move," she said. "It’s actually very pretty." The arrangement is close to a strategy she used before, against her sister. "I beat Judit on that."
The students murmured. This demanded respect. Susan Polgár may be the first woman ever to earn the grandmaster title, but her younger sister is the best female chess player of all time.
There are three Polgár sisters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia), and Judit: all chess prodigies, raised by Laszlo and Klara in Budapest during the Cold War. Rearing them in modest conditions, where a walk to the stationery store was a great event, the Polgárs homeschooled their girls, defying a skeptical and chauvinist Communist system. They lived chess, often practicing for eight hours a day. By the end of the 1980s, the family had become a phenomenon: wealthy, stars in Hungary and, when they visited the United States, headline news.
The girls were not an experiment in any proper form. Laszlo knew that. There was no control. But soon enough, their story outgrew their lives. They became prime examples in a psychological debate that has existed for a century: Does success depend more on the accidents of genetics or the decisions of upbringing? Nature or nurture? In its most recent form, that debate has revolved around the position, advanced by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, that intense practice is the most dominant variable in success. The Polgárs would seem to suggest: Yes.
You may have heard of Ericsson. His work was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 best seller, Outliers, which spawned the notion of 10,000 hours of practice, in particular, as a mythical threshold to success. It’s a cultural fixture. Turn on the radio and you’ll hear a musician talking about "getting his 10,000 hours" in. This popularization also caused a backlash — documented in David Epstein’s book The Sports Gene and elsewhere — of researchers arguing that genetics and other factors are as important as practice. It’s a value-laden struggle, with precious few facts. In a globalized world where returns concentrate to top performers, research showing the primacy of practice is a hopeful, democratic message. "The scientific formulation of the American dream," as one psychologist told me. The Polgárs embody that hope. Is it a false hope? (...)
Equipped with celebrity and influence, Susan is an excellent recruiter. Many of her students are ranked higher than her; three have topped even Judit. Yet despite their great individual skill, the team members enjoy camaraderie. They visit the gym together. They’ve absorbed the Polgár way.
"Life and chess, they are similar in some points," Andre Diamant, a Brazilian graduate student and the team’s longest-tenured player, said during a break from practice. "Chess players know they need to study. They need to work. They need to improve. And they do that. In life, they have this same thing."
You’re probably nodding your head. Few would dismiss the value of hard work. But if there’s a snag to the Polgár method of success, it might arise from a simple question: Susan and her sisters had similar childhoods. So why was Judit so much better?
by Paul Voosen, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: Polly Becker
Saturday, November 21, 2015
I Knew I Would Never Drive a Taxi Again
Whenever someone claims that it’s not about the money, you know the chances are that really, it is. And I’d be lying if I said my decision to switch away from driving a taxi and start driving for Lyft had nothing to do with the amount I was earning. But money was only part of my decision—and probably not in the way you might think.
Instead it was one part of a culmination of events that led me to renounce everything I’d said before, to become a traitor, a scab, and to betray many people I’d come to know in the cab business.
I wasn’t the first, and I surely wouldn’t be the last. But that didn’t make me feel any better about it. There were people who I’d come to care about, good people, people that I counted among my genuine friends, who would be deeply disappointed by my treachery. Perhaps it had simply taken me way too long — and even a stint in rehab — to finally accept that I couldn’t spend my life trying to live up to other people’s expectations. And after all, isn’t that what loyalty is really all about?
When I first started driving a taxi, Saturday nights were the most coveted shift of the week. Typically, only medallion owners and drivers with the most seniority got them. Once in a while, if you were lucky or willing to wait around for several hours, then a driver like me — with only a few years under his belt — could get a cab to drive on a Saturday night, and the chance to make $400, or even $500, in a single shift.
Nowadays, however, with Uber and Lyft cars flooding the streets, it’s become the hardest shift to fill. It’s not uncommon for a Saturday night taxi to go one, or even two hours at a stretch without a single fare. What used to be exciting is now something drivers dread: I certainly know that driving around empty in a sea of vacant taxis, while watching people all around me hop into their Uber and Lyft rides, left me feeling desperate and frustrated.
It used to be that late at night, and not just on Saturdays, I could park my cab right outside the door of the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco — a nightclub just off the beaten path. Excited to see an available taxi waiting, people exiting the club would jump right in, one fare after the other, it was my spot. But soon, people leaving the club began waving me off. “No thanks,” they’d say, as they pulled out their iPhones and waited five or 10 minutes, sometimes even in the rain, until a car with one of those ridiculous pink moustaches, or a glowing blue “U” on it would pull up and drive them off into the night.
I didn’t get it.
I’m right here.
I’m ready to go.
All I got was “No thanks,” from person after person after person. I felt dejected. It made no sense to me.
I got a reprieve from my frustrations when I was offered a part-time job in the cab company’s operations office. Back then, the phones were still constantly ringing, and dispatch was busy with customers calling for cabs. The money was good, and the shifts were shorter than on the road. Best of all though, a job in the office usually came with the ability to get a cab — a good cab — immediately, whenever I wanted. My days of waiting around for hours just so that I could go to work were finally over. Or so I thought.
As it turned out, drivers with better or more longstanding connections were getting put out in taxis ahead of me, and I was still being made to wait. Except now the wait was even longer because more and more drivers were fighting for shifts, and for good cabs to drive. Meanwhile, the day drivers were making things even worse by keeping their cabs out longer, attempting to make up for their falling incomes. Every hour, hell, every minute that I waited, I could feel the crisp $20s just slipping through my grasp.
The topic being discussed among the various huddles of angry cabbies waiting there with me was always the same: Uber and Lyft. One driver heard that the mayor’s daughter had invested in Lyft. Another had heard that the mayor had exclaimed, “Uber has finally solved San Francisco’s taxi problem!” I didn’t know if either was true, but it was no secret that Mayor Ed Lee was a vocal supporter of “the sharing economy.” He led visiting politicos on tours through Uber’s headquarters, and had even officially declared July 13th as “Lyft Day” in San Francisco. I couldn’t think of a bigger slap in the face.
Still, as much as I hated Uber and Lyft—and as much as I hated our mayor—I knew that none of them were going away anytime soon. I continued to see Lyft, and particularly Uber, as illegal bullies that were flaunting the law. The whole rideshare premise, that these were just regular folks, “citizen drivers,” who just happened to be going your way and would give you a ride, was complete bullshit. It reminded me of the last line in The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” No, call it what you want, but this was deregulation.
Even so, as I looked down my nose at these intruders, and their over-reliance on GPS to find their way through the maze of my city, I found myself feeling conflicted. While they were already doing essentially the same job as me, I knew these rideshare drivers would never have considered actually becoming taxi drivers, nor did they think of themselves in this way. Things just weren’t that simple. There was something else, something other than the money, that kept them coming back out here day after day, and night after night.
So when my fellow cab drivers complained that “Uber and Lyft are stealing my passengers!” I’d reply, “They aren’t stealing anything — we’re giving them away.”
I would argue that every time they refused to accept a credit card, and every time they refused to take passengers to their homes in the Sunset, or the Richmond Districts, they were only creating more Uber customers.
But they just looked at me like there was something growing out of my head.
I began to sense a chasm widening between us. Even while they could feel everything slipping away, they continued behaving as though there would always be more customers, more tourists, more conventioneers, to replace the ones we were losing. In their eyes—in their cab driver’s eyes—the passengers were there for them, and not the other way around. It had always been that way. Why should anything change now?
I remember imagining the person who decided to chop down the last remaining tree on Easter Island, and in doing so cued the collapse of an entire civilization. I became convinced; it had to have been a cab driver.
Instead it was one part of a culmination of events that led me to renounce everything I’d said before, to become a traitor, a scab, and to betray many people I’d come to know in the cab business.
I wasn’t the first, and I surely wouldn’t be the last. But that didn’t make me feel any better about it. There were people who I’d come to care about, good people, people that I counted among my genuine friends, who would be deeply disappointed by my treachery. Perhaps it had simply taken me way too long — and even a stint in rehab — to finally accept that I couldn’t spend my life trying to live up to other people’s expectations. And after all, isn’t that what loyalty is really all about?
When I first started driving a taxi, Saturday nights were the most coveted shift of the week. Typically, only medallion owners and drivers with the most seniority got them. Once in a while, if you were lucky or willing to wait around for several hours, then a driver like me — with only a few years under his belt — could get a cab to drive on a Saturday night, and the chance to make $400, or even $500, in a single shift.Nowadays, however, with Uber and Lyft cars flooding the streets, it’s become the hardest shift to fill. It’s not uncommon for a Saturday night taxi to go one, or even two hours at a stretch without a single fare. What used to be exciting is now something drivers dread: I certainly know that driving around empty in a sea of vacant taxis, while watching people all around me hop into their Uber and Lyft rides, left me feeling desperate and frustrated.
It used to be that late at night, and not just on Saturdays, I could park my cab right outside the door of the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco — a nightclub just off the beaten path. Excited to see an available taxi waiting, people exiting the club would jump right in, one fare after the other, it was my spot. But soon, people leaving the club began waving me off. “No thanks,” they’d say, as they pulled out their iPhones and waited five or 10 minutes, sometimes even in the rain, until a car with one of those ridiculous pink moustaches, or a glowing blue “U” on it would pull up and drive them off into the night.
I didn’t get it.
I’m right here.
I’m ready to go.
All I got was “No thanks,” from person after person after person. I felt dejected. It made no sense to me.
I got a reprieve from my frustrations when I was offered a part-time job in the cab company’s operations office. Back then, the phones were still constantly ringing, and dispatch was busy with customers calling for cabs. The money was good, and the shifts were shorter than on the road. Best of all though, a job in the office usually came with the ability to get a cab — a good cab — immediately, whenever I wanted. My days of waiting around for hours just so that I could go to work were finally over. Or so I thought.
As it turned out, drivers with better or more longstanding connections were getting put out in taxis ahead of me, and I was still being made to wait. Except now the wait was even longer because more and more drivers were fighting for shifts, and for good cabs to drive. Meanwhile, the day drivers were making things even worse by keeping their cabs out longer, attempting to make up for their falling incomes. Every hour, hell, every minute that I waited, I could feel the crisp $20s just slipping through my grasp.
The topic being discussed among the various huddles of angry cabbies waiting there with me was always the same: Uber and Lyft. One driver heard that the mayor’s daughter had invested in Lyft. Another had heard that the mayor had exclaimed, “Uber has finally solved San Francisco’s taxi problem!” I didn’t know if either was true, but it was no secret that Mayor Ed Lee was a vocal supporter of “the sharing economy.” He led visiting politicos on tours through Uber’s headquarters, and had even officially declared July 13th as “Lyft Day” in San Francisco. I couldn’t think of a bigger slap in the face.
Still, as much as I hated Uber and Lyft—and as much as I hated our mayor—I knew that none of them were going away anytime soon. I continued to see Lyft, and particularly Uber, as illegal bullies that were flaunting the law. The whole rideshare premise, that these were just regular folks, “citizen drivers,” who just happened to be going your way and would give you a ride, was complete bullshit. It reminded me of the last line in The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” No, call it what you want, but this was deregulation.
Even so, as I looked down my nose at these intruders, and their over-reliance on GPS to find their way through the maze of my city, I found myself feeling conflicted. While they were already doing essentially the same job as me, I knew these rideshare drivers would never have considered actually becoming taxi drivers, nor did they think of themselves in this way. Things just weren’t that simple. There was something else, something other than the money, that kept them coming back out here day after day, and night after night.
So when my fellow cab drivers complained that “Uber and Lyft are stealing my passengers!” I’d reply, “They aren’t stealing anything — we’re giving them away.”
I would argue that every time they refused to accept a credit card, and every time they refused to take passengers to their homes in the Sunset, or the Richmond Districts, they were only creating more Uber customers.
But they just looked at me like there was something growing out of my head.
I began to sense a chasm widening between us. Even while they could feel everything slipping away, they continued behaving as though there would always be more customers, more tourists, more conventioneers, to replace the ones we were losing. In their eyes—in their cab driver’s eyes—the passengers were there for them, and not the other way around. It had always been that way. Why should anything change now?
I remember imagining the person who decided to chop down the last remaining tree on Easter Island, and in doing so cued the collapse of an entire civilization. I became convinced; it had to have been a cab driver.
by Jon Kessler, On Demand | Read more:
Image: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
Japan Deco Matchbox Art
Young designers trained in Germany and Europe returned to Japan and produced elegant advertising for large companies such as Shiseido. Local artists and painters were both influenced by these national brands and spurred to produce more original designs. Many of these designs still showed the asymmetry and stylized flat shapes typical of Japanese woodblock prints. Some had amazingly clever use of only red and black ink colors while others used gold and silver metallic inks to add to their palette.
The Japanese matchbox labels are breathtaking in their stark beauty and simplicity: just a hand holding a glass or a dancing figure frozen in time. They were only low end ephemera but their reflection on the culture that produced them speaks of a world long gone.
by Arnon Reisman, A Phillumenist | Read more:
Friday, November 20, 2015
The Secret Sneaker Market — and Why it Matters
00:12 This is the Air Jordan 3 Black Cement. This might be the most important sneaker in history. First released in 1988, this is the shoe that started Nike marketing as we know it. This is the shoe that propelled the entire Air Jordan lineage, and perhaps saved Nike. The Air Jordan 3 Black Cement did for sneakers what the iPhone did for phones. It's been re-released four times. Every celebrity's been seen wearing it. There's a site about what to wear with the Black Cement. It's been right under your nose for decades and you never looked down. And right about now, most of you are probably thinking, "Sneakers?"
00:57 (Laughter)
00:59 Yes. Yes, sneakers. Some extraordinary things about sneakers and data and Nike and how they're all related, possibly, to the future of all online commerce.
01:14 In 2011, the last time the Jordan 3 Black Cement was released, at a retail of 160 dollars, it sold out globally in minutes. And that's because people were camped outside of sneaker stores for days before it went on sale. And just minutes after that, thousands of those pairs were on eBay for two and three times retail. In fact, there's over 1,000 pairs on eBay right now, four years later. But here's the thing:this happens every single Saturday. Every week there's another release or two or three, and every shoe has a story as rich and compelling as the Jordan 3 Black Cement.
01:53 This is Nike building the marketplace for sneakerheads -- people who collect sneakers -- and my daughter.
02:02 (Laughter)
02:04 That's an "I love Dad" T-shirt.
02:07 For the brands, sneakerheads are a very important demographic. These are the tastemakers; these are the Apple fanboys. Because who else is going to buy a pair of $8,000 Back to the Future sneakers?
02:19 ( Laughter)
02:21 Yeah, 8,000 dollars.
02:24 And while that's obviously the anomaly, the resell sneaker market is definitely not. Thirty years in the making, what started as an underground culture of a few people who like sneakers just a bit too much --
02:36 (Laughter)
02:39 Now we have sneaker addictions. In a market where in the past 12 months, there have been over nine million pairs of shoes resold in the United States alone, at a value of 1.2 billion dollars. And that's a conservative estimate -- I should know, I am a sneakerhead. This is my collection. In the pantheon of great collections, mine doesn't even register. I have about 250 pairs, but trust me, I am small-time.People have thousands.
03:09 I'm a very typical 37-year-old sneakerhead. I grew up playing basketball when Michael Jordan played, I always wanted Air Jordans, my mother would never buy me Air Jordans, as soon as I got some money I bought Air Jordans -- literally, we all have the exact same story. But here's where mine diverged. After starting three companies, I took a job as a strategy consultant, when I very quickly realized that I didn't know the first thing about data. But I learned, because I had to, and I liked it. So I thought, I wonder if I could get ahold of some sneaker data, just to play with for my own amusement. The goal was to develop a price guide, a real data-driven view of the market. And four years later, we're analyzing over 25 million transactions, providing real-time analytics on thousands of sneakers. Now sneakerheads check prices while camping out for releases. Others have used the data to validate insurance claims.And the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry.And here's the best part: sneakerheads have sneaker portfolios.
04:17 (Laughter)
04:19 Sneakerheads can track the value of their collection over time, compare it to others, and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account. So sneakerhead Dan builds his collection and identifies which 352 are his. He can see it's worth 103,000 dollars -- frankly, a modest collection. At the asset level, he can see gain-loss by shoe. Here he's made over 600 dollars on one pair. I have one of those.
04:46 (Laughter)
04:49 So an unregulated 1.2 billion dollar industry that thrives as much on the street as it does online, and has spawned fundamental financial services for sneakers? At some point I asked myself what's really going on in the market, and two comparisons started to emerge. Are sneakers more like stocks or drugs?
00:57 (Laughter)
00:59 Yes. Yes, sneakers. Some extraordinary things about sneakers and data and Nike and how they're all related, possibly, to the future of all online commerce.
01:14 In 2011, the last time the Jordan 3 Black Cement was released, at a retail of 160 dollars, it sold out globally in minutes. And that's because people were camped outside of sneaker stores for days before it went on sale. And just minutes after that, thousands of those pairs were on eBay for two and three times retail. In fact, there's over 1,000 pairs on eBay right now, four years later. But here's the thing:this happens every single Saturday. Every week there's another release or two or three, and every shoe has a story as rich and compelling as the Jordan 3 Black Cement.01:53 This is Nike building the marketplace for sneakerheads -- people who collect sneakers -- and my daughter.
02:02 (Laughter)
02:04 That's an "I love Dad" T-shirt.
02:07 For the brands, sneakerheads are a very important demographic. These are the tastemakers; these are the Apple fanboys. Because who else is going to buy a pair of $8,000 Back to the Future sneakers?
02:19 ( Laughter)
02:21 Yeah, 8,000 dollars.
02:24 And while that's obviously the anomaly, the resell sneaker market is definitely not. Thirty years in the making, what started as an underground culture of a few people who like sneakers just a bit too much --
02:36 (Laughter)
02:39 Now we have sneaker addictions. In a market where in the past 12 months, there have been over nine million pairs of shoes resold in the United States alone, at a value of 1.2 billion dollars. And that's a conservative estimate -- I should know, I am a sneakerhead. This is my collection. In the pantheon of great collections, mine doesn't even register. I have about 250 pairs, but trust me, I am small-time.People have thousands.
03:09 I'm a very typical 37-year-old sneakerhead. I grew up playing basketball when Michael Jordan played, I always wanted Air Jordans, my mother would never buy me Air Jordans, as soon as I got some money I bought Air Jordans -- literally, we all have the exact same story. But here's where mine diverged. After starting three companies, I took a job as a strategy consultant, when I very quickly realized that I didn't know the first thing about data. But I learned, because I had to, and I liked it. So I thought, I wonder if I could get ahold of some sneaker data, just to play with for my own amusement. The goal was to develop a price guide, a real data-driven view of the market. And four years later, we're analyzing over 25 million transactions, providing real-time analytics on thousands of sneakers. Now sneakerheads check prices while camping out for releases. Others have used the data to validate insurance claims.And the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry.And here's the best part: sneakerheads have sneaker portfolios.
04:17 (Laughter)
04:19 Sneakerheads can track the value of their collection over time, compare it to others, and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account. So sneakerhead Dan builds his collection and identifies which 352 are his. He can see it's worth 103,000 dollars -- frankly, a modest collection. At the asset level, he can see gain-loss by shoe. Here he's made over 600 dollars on one pair. I have one of those.
04:46 (Laughter)
04:49 So an unregulated 1.2 billion dollar industry that thrives as much on the street as it does online, and has spawned fundamental financial services for sneakers? At some point I asked myself what's really going on in the market, and two comparisons started to emerge. Are sneakers more like stocks or drugs?
by Josh Luber, TED | Read more:
Image: via:
The Samoan Pipeline
How does a tiny island, 5,000 miles from the U.S. mainland, produce so many professional football players?
There is one main road on Tutuila, about 35 miles long. There are no stoplights. The speed limit is 25 miles per hour. Two tuna canneries are the largest employers; workers make less than $10,000 a year. The island has one McDonald’s, one movie theater, several new Chinese restaurants, and a T-shirt shop called Pacific Roots. With job opportunities limited and an unemployment rate between 10 and 20 percent — a main reason for the diaspora — it is not surprising to learn that American Samoa has the highest rate of military enlistment of any U.S. state or territory.
“The biggest dream of everyone in Samoa is to leave the island and look for a better future,” says Peter Gurr, the deputy director of the American Samoa Department of Agriculture. “Right now, if you don’t get a college scholarship, the only thing to do is join the military. And then there’s football. Our largest exports are the tuna and football.” Even though school is conducted in both Samoan and English — often mixed into the same paragraph or sentence — the largest obstacle for football hopefuls is college standardized tests.
Samoans have been playing rugby since the 1920s, when it was introduced by Marist missionaries. American football didn’t come to the island until the 1960s, after an article in Reader’s Digest, headlined “America’s Shame in the Pacific,” brought attention to the deplorable conditions of the tropical-island-cum-American-military-base: “Amid enchanting scenery and smiling Polynesians — praised by Robert Louis Stevenson as ‘God’s best, at least God’s sweetest, works’ — the visitor is shocked to encounter government buildings peeling and rotting on their foundations, beautiful Pago Pago Bay marred and befouled by hideous over-water outhouses, rutty and teeth-jarring roads unrepaired for years.”
Responding to the outrage that followed, the Kennedy administration provided a makeover that pushed the culture into modernity. Along with plumbing, electricity, roads, schools, and a high school football program, the Samoans received cable TV. Watching football became a favorite pastime.
The first Samoan to play in the NFL was Al Lolotai. After starring at Mormon-affiliated Weber State University in Utah, he played for the Washington Redskins in 1945 and then five more years in the now-defunct All-America Football Conference. It wasn’t long before the island was discovered as a wellspring of football talent. Leading the way were coaches at universities with strong Mormon ties. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which believes that Polynesians are heirs to the blessings promised to Abraham’s descendants, has been sending missionaries to the region since the mid-1800s.
Over the years football coaches have found on the island a ready inventory of large, big-boned, and nimble Samoans, with the kind of solid base that football coaches love: massive from the waist down but still able to move their feet. Samoans’ facility with footwork is often attributed to tribal dances and the common practice of going barefoot. Their love of combat is derived from a fierce warrior culture that goes back hundreds of years. With an upbringing that stresses hard work, discipline, and devotion to authority, both heavenly and earthbound, Polynesians have come to be considered the ultimate clay from which to mold a football player. It is as if a childhood of gentle obedience translates into a passion for ferocious violent contact, the kind of collisions that resonate through a stadium and electrify the crowd.
By the 1970s, coaches from Hawaii and Utah began to recruit heavily from Polynesia; in time, the practice spread. More than 100 Polynesians have since played in the NFL. By now the names are well-known. Troy Polamalu, Junior Seau, Jesse Sapolu — and last year’s Heisman winner, Mariota. Hundreds more, like Coach Oak and Pati Pati, have benefited from scholarships.
by Mike Sager, California Sunday Magazine | Read more:
Image: Nathanael Turner
Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved for Consumption
A genetically engineered salmon from AquaBounty Technologies, rear, with a conventionally raised sibling roughly the same age.
by Andrew Pollack, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Paul Darrow for The New York Times
The Cult of the Toto Toilet
[ed. See also: Electronic Bidet Toilet Seat Is the Luxury You Won’t Want to Live Without. Even Tom Brady has one.]
Last year, Bennett Friedman, who owns a plumbing showroom in Manhattan called AF New York, took a business trip to Milan. On the morning of his return he faced a choice: stop in the bathroom there or wait until he got home. The flight was nine hours. He waited.
The move seems almost masochistic. But in his home and office bathrooms, Mr. Friedman had installed a Toto washlet. To sit upon a standard commode, he said, would be like “going back to the Stone Age.”
“It feels very uncivilized,” he said.
For those who own Japanese toilets, there is a cultish devotion. They boast heated seats, a bidet function for a rear cleanse and an air-purifying system that deodorizes during use. The need for toilet paper is virtually eliminated (there is an air dryer) and “you left the lid up” squabbles need never take place (the seat lifts and closes automatically in many models).
Jean Z. Poh, founder of the luxury jewelry e-commerce site Swoonery.com, said a washlet is, in its own way, a luxury item.
“I’ve had conversations about washlets with people and it’s always, ‘How good is your life now?’” Ms. Poh said. “It’s about the heated seats. Your life is really good when you have a heated toilet seat.”
Ms. Poh, who lives on the Upper East Side, first encountered a washlet while living in Asia, where they are widespread, especially in Japan, where hotels, restaurants, airports and baseball stadiums are equipped with them, in addition to millions of private homes.
In America, washlets remain, like the metric system, a foreign cultural curiosity that has never widely caught on. The bidet tends to cause embarrassment; the electronic push-button controls to confound.(...)
Toto doesn’t sell its washlets in big-box stores like Home Depot, preferring the showroom experience instead. The company also plans to open an educational gallery in Manhattan next spring, where people can learn about the Toto technology. Most washlet owners, then, are converted after trying one out in the world. At a boutique hotel, say, or on a trip to Asia.
Such was the case with Robert Aboulache. Before he and his family went on a vacation to Japan, he said, friends who had visited the country told him he would love the toilets. “I thought, ‘How great can the toilets be?’” Mr. Aboulache said. “They were amazing. Some have noisemakers to cover up the sound. You can pivot that little sprayer. The water can be heated or not. We got home, and I thought, ‘This is not the same.’”
Three days later, Mr. Aboulache went online and bought a Toto washlet, which he installed in the shared upstairs bathroom of his home in Los Angeles as a surprise for his wife and son.
“We’ve been delighted,” he said. “It’s our favorite toilet.”
Last year, Bennett Friedman, who owns a plumbing showroom in Manhattan called AF New York, took a business trip to Milan. On the morning of his return he faced a choice: stop in the bathroom there or wait until he got home. The flight was nine hours. He waited.
The move seems almost masochistic. But in his home and office bathrooms, Mr. Friedman had installed a Toto washlet. To sit upon a standard commode, he said, would be like “going back to the Stone Age.”“It feels very uncivilized,” he said.
For those who own Japanese toilets, there is a cultish devotion. They boast heated seats, a bidet function for a rear cleanse and an air-purifying system that deodorizes during use. The need for toilet paper is virtually eliminated (there is an air dryer) and “you left the lid up” squabbles need never take place (the seat lifts and closes automatically in many models).
Jean Z. Poh, founder of the luxury jewelry e-commerce site Swoonery.com, said a washlet is, in its own way, a luxury item.
“I’ve had conversations about washlets with people and it’s always, ‘How good is your life now?’” Ms. Poh said. “It’s about the heated seats. Your life is really good when you have a heated toilet seat.”
Ms. Poh, who lives on the Upper East Side, first encountered a washlet while living in Asia, where they are widespread, especially in Japan, where hotels, restaurants, airports and baseball stadiums are equipped with them, in addition to millions of private homes.
In America, washlets remain, like the metric system, a foreign cultural curiosity that has never widely caught on. The bidet tends to cause embarrassment; the electronic push-button controls to confound.(...)
Toto doesn’t sell its washlets in big-box stores like Home Depot, preferring the showroom experience instead. The company also plans to open an educational gallery in Manhattan next spring, where people can learn about the Toto technology. Most washlet owners, then, are converted after trying one out in the world. At a boutique hotel, say, or on a trip to Asia.
Such was the case with Robert Aboulache. Before he and his family went on a vacation to Japan, he said, friends who had visited the country told him he would love the toilets. “I thought, ‘How great can the toilets be?’” Mr. Aboulache said. “They were amazing. Some have noisemakers to cover up the sound. You can pivot that little sprayer. The water can be heated or not. We got home, and I thought, ‘This is not the same.’”
Three days later, Mr. Aboulache went online and bought a Toto washlet, which he installed in the shared upstairs bathroom of his home in Los Angeles as a surprise for his wife and son.
“We’ve been delighted,” he said. “It’s our favorite toilet.”
by Steven Kurutz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Toto
Thursday, November 19, 2015
The Tragically Short Half-Life of Online Empathy
Everything’s accelerated these days, and the same must be said for grief online. The Internet cycles through all five stages in as many tweets. We find it hurtling toward us: unavoidable, wall-to-wall.
And then, before we’ve processed it, the grief’s already gone.
In the four days since extremists slaughtered 129 people in Paris, millions of witnesses — present only through their computer screens — posted prayers and pictures and promised solidarity. For four hours, then five, then six, they trended Twitter hashtags like #PorteOuverte and #PrayforParis. They laid French flags over their Facebook photos and shared images by artists like Jean Jullien. And just as quickly, their posts reverted: back to quips about sports teams, viral videos, pictures with friends — now posted by little avatars striped in the French blue, white and red.
These posts feel inappropriate — indecorous, somehow. As if their posters were telling jokes at a very somber funeral. The world must move on, of course; no one’s saying it shouldn’t. And social media makes an imprecise weather vane for our collective conscience.
Still, it makes one wonder: Is there a half-life to grief? And has the Internet shortened it, as it has all other things?
What's the half-life of Internet solidarity?
By Sunday, not a single solidarity hashtag made the top 100 trending topics, as measured by the analytics site Trendinalia. By Monday, even news organizations had cut their Paris tweets by half or more. I tallied every tweet sent by every major online-only publisher from Nov. 14 to Nov. 16, figuring these guys are the ones who best “get” the Internet; of them, only Business Insider has maintained the same ratio of Paris tweets — and it didn’t have much to begin with.
This is not, to be clear, meant as criticism: It’s merely an observation of fact. News breaks, and we’re devoured by it; interest decays logarithmically, online and off it, after that.
by Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: EPA/Guillaume Horcajuelo
Breaking Bad was a UI Problem
We are, by most accounts, in the throes of a new “golden age” of “prestige television,” or whatever it is you want to call this current abundance of extremely serious hour-long dramas that inspire such fanatical devotion. It is hard work even for those who don’t watch. With the notable exception of timely and topical late night talk shows, we have largely moved from “Did you see [an episode]?” to “Do you watch [an entire series]?” Viewership has become a commitment, even an obligation.
As with most forms of media, there is now far more than we could ever keep up with, but I’m not here to scold you — go right ahead, watch as much as you want! Life outside is exhausting, and nobody faults you for wanting to melt into your couch the moment you walk through the front door. It’s not that there is too much television. There is, with some acceptable margin of error, roughly the right amount of television, whatever that means as determined by audience attention and other nebulous cultural and market forces. What’s weird is that so much of it is headed in the same direction.
When Breaking Bad debuted in 2008 — to comparatively little critical acclaim, at first — Netflix still had less than 10 million subscribers to its hybrid service, which combined a lackluster streaming library with DVDs sent by mail. Today they now have 30 million subscribers, most paying for the streaming feature alone. Nearly forty percent of American homes pay for access to a streaming video service like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video. A theory: even excluding forays into original programming, their prevalence has now started to shape the material they present.
As we’ve seen from a decade of arms races in SEO and social media, content evolves to jockey for position with its audience. Across its supported devices, Netflix has many slight variations on its user interface, all of which are atrocious by any measure except one: the array of available options is reliably insane, impossible to parse, but its mere presence usually does entice you to eventually click on something, if only because you want the list of titles to disappear and give way to something more entertaining than scrolling.
If consumers find all the options overwhelming, a simple and obvious result is gravitating toward serials; you get dozens, even hundreds of hours of entertainment without having to face down another decision. The shows can’t help but cater to this, because otherwise they will cease to exist, so even the introduction of light serial elements into previously episodic formats will pay off. Sitcoms are no longer purely driven by situations, instead relying on the progression of a character along a story arc — Mindy Kaling’s love life, Leslie Knope’s budding political career, lasting effects of Sterling Archer’s endless shenanigans. Details matter more than they used to. Picking something to watch can be exhausting if you put any thought into the decision; anything the show can do to help is appreciated, and the quickest way to the top of the user interface is through the “Recently Watched” list. The primary force driving the death of channel surfing may be the decreasingly viability of bundling programs and channels, but a close second is that the shows just don’t lend themselves to it.
This is a huge change from the pre-internet world of broadcast television, when many popular shows were isolated plot nuggets because it couldn’t be assumed that the viewer had been following previous installments. Now the entire back catalog is all right there, hidden beneath a button hovering just to the north. That in itself also just threatens more fatigue: which episode to watch? Damn, another decision to wrestle with!
Better to just line them all up in order.
Increased access brings its own kind of exhaustion, no matter the interface. Unless you have some bizarre taste for repeatedly facing down inconsequential decisions, your selections are likely driven by information overload. Information overload is a fundamental feature of the internet. The internet has introduced scales that tower beyond anything else we’ve invented aside from telescopes and microscopes. You are far less likely to own either of those than you are to have a Netflix subscription.
Serial television may be on the rise in response to consumer fatigue, but it is probably still a good thing for the medium — short-form stories and sketches are still fair game, and shorter episodic detours can still be embedded within a larger trajectory, and it’s easier to be creatively ambitious when the format allows larger canvases. Mainstream television is probably better overall than it was ten or twenty years ago, and since it is our most voluminous professional cultural product, this change should be applauded no matter how much of it you actually partake in.
But the power balance is clear. A few years ago, Netflix reported to Wired that 75% of user activity is driven by recommendation algorithms, which were fed classification data by a team of 40 data entry folks with varying degrees of industry engagement. At the time, they also employed 800 software developers. So engineering trumps cultural knowledge — is it really such a huge leap to then say the user interface shapes the script?
by Vijith Assar, The Message | Read More:
Image: Breaking Bad
As with most forms of media, there is now far more than we could ever keep up with, but I’m not here to scold you — go right ahead, watch as much as you want! Life outside is exhausting, and nobody faults you for wanting to melt into your couch the moment you walk through the front door. It’s not that there is too much television. There is, with some acceptable margin of error, roughly the right amount of television, whatever that means as determined by audience attention and other nebulous cultural and market forces. What’s weird is that so much of it is headed in the same direction.When Breaking Bad debuted in 2008 — to comparatively little critical acclaim, at first — Netflix still had less than 10 million subscribers to its hybrid service, which combined a lackluster streaming library with DVDs sent by mail. Today they now have 30 million subscribers, most paying for the streaming feature alone. Nearly forty percent of American homes pay for access to a streaming video service like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video. A theory: even excluding forays into original programming, their prevalence has now started to shape the material they present.
As we’ve seen from a decade of arms races in SEO and social media, content evolves to jockey for position with its audience. Across its supported devices, Netflix has many slight variations on its user interface, all of which are atrocious by any measure except one: the array of available options is reliably insane, impossible to parse, but its mere presence usually does entice you to eventually click on something, if only because you want the list of titles to disappear and give way to something more entertaining than scrolling.
If consumers find all the options overwhelming, a simple and obvious result is gravitating toward serials; you get dozens, even hundreds of hours of entertainment without having to face down another decision. The shows can’t help but cater to this, because otherwise they will cease to exist, so even the introduction of light serial elements into previously episodic formats will pay off. Sitcoms are no longer purely driven by situations, instead relying on the progression of a character along a story arc — Mindy Kaling’s love life, Leslie Knope’s budding political career, lasting effects of Sterling Archer’s endless shenanigans. Details matter more than they used to. Picking something to watch can be exhausting if you put any thought into the decision; anything the show can do to help is appreciated, and the quickest way to the top of the user interface is through the “Recently Watched” list. The primary force driving the death of channel surfing may be the decreasingly viability of bundling programs and channels, but a close second is that the shows just don’t lend themselves to it.
This is a huge change from the pre-internet world of broadcast television, when many popular shows were isolated plot nuggets because it couldn’t be assumed that the viewer had been following previous installments. Now the entire back catalog is all right there, hidden beneath a button hovering just to the north. That in itself also just threatens more fatigue: which episode to watch? Damn, another decision to wrestle with!
Better to just line them all up in order.
Increased access brings its own kind of exhaustion, no matter the interface. Unless you have some bizarre taste for repeatedly facing down inconsequential decisions, your selections are likely driven by information overload. Information overload is a fundamental feature of the internet. The internet has introduced scales that tower beyond anything else we’ve invented aside from telescopes and microscopes. You are far less likely to own either of those than you are to have a Netflix subscription.
Serial television may be on the rise in response to consumer fatigue, but it is probably still a good thing for the medium — short-form stories and sketches are still fair game, and shorter episodic detours can still be embedded within a larger trajectory, and it’s easier to be creatively ambitious when the format allows larger canvases. Mainstream television is probably better overall than it was ten or twenty years ago, and since it is our most voluminous professional cultural product, this change should be applauded no matter how much of it you actually partake in.
But the power balance is clear. A few years ago, Netflix reported to Wired that 75% of user activity is driven by recommendation algorithms, which were fed classification data by a team of 40 data entry folks with varying degrees of industry engagement. At the time, they also employed 800 software developers. So engineering trumps cultural knowledge — is it really such a huge leap to then say the user interface shapes the script?
by Vijith Assar, The Message | Read More:
Image: Breaking Bad
Great Pretenders
One Sunday evening recently, I went to a stranger’s apartment for my first ‘larp’ (live‑action role-play). I was ushered into the living room, where I found three makeshift tents, reminiscent of forts I used to make as a child. Other props – trail snacks, water bottles, hiking gear – littered the floor. It was a little like arriving at a four-year-old’s playdate. I wasn’t sure my make‑believe skills were what they used to be. For the next few hours in that room in Oakland, California, I and five other brave souls would become immersed in The Climb, a game that had us imagine summiting a Himalayan peak 6,900 metres above the Tarphel Valley of Bhutan.
Six nametags lay on the floor. After much hesitation, I picked ‘Mercer: an internet zillionaire’. I’ve spent much time satirising the tech start-up scene, so this character wasn’t too much of a stretch. Profile sheets told us about our driving motivations and relationships with the other summiteers. Mercer had a crush on a character called Sweet, and had also funded the climbing expedition. All right then. One of my fellow climbers turned on the stereo, and an MP3 of snow-storm sound effects started to play.
The game was designed so that only two of the six players would be able to summit. Part of the drama would be selecting those two players. But the point of the exercise wasn’t to ‘win’ and be the one to summit. The point was to be present to the dynamics of the experience. We weren’t going to play The Climb. We were going to live it.
Larp had caught my attention as an interesting subculture. No longer just a medium for nerds running around in the woods with swords, it was increasingly billed as a vehicle for deep emotional exploration and cultural experimentation. In addition to the traditional Viking, vampire and zombie scenarios, larps have been designed around serious themes – refugee crisis, gender, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, imprisonment. As someone who cares deeply about social change and personal transformation, that was exciting to me. Larps were said to let players experience particular emotions, to step into each other’s perspective, possibly even explore artistic and political visions for new forms of society. (...)
When the Belgian artist and scientist Angelo Vermeulen became the crew commander of HI-SEAS, a Mars mission simulation that had six pretend astronauts live for four months in a dome on a barren lava field in Hawaii, he was effectively engaged in a larp. During the mission, Vermeulen experimented with food production, leadership style (the crew rotated its leaders), and exercise regimes. NASA funded the research as a way of exploring future space‑colony design.
But why stop there? What if we had used role-playing games to model different approaches to banking and finance after the financial crisis? Or experiment with the use of crypto-currencies? What if we used pop-up temporary realities to explore the redistribution of resources or alternatives to the welfare state? At a time of growing alienation, larps can help us explore communitarian possibilities. Not ready to open your relationship, but interested in dabbling in non-monogamy? Try larping.
Six nametags lay on the floor. After much hesitation, I picked ‘Mercer: an internet zillionaire’. I’ve spent much time satirising the tech start-up scene, so this character wasn’t too much of a stretch. Profile sheets told us about our driving motivations and relationships with the other summiteers. Mercer had a crush on a character called Sweet, and had also funded the climbing expedition. All right then. One of my fellow climbers turned on the stereo, and an MP3 of snow-storm sound effects started to play.The game was designed so that only two of the six players would be able to summit. Part of the drama would be selecting those two players. But the point of the exercise wasn’t to ‘win’ and be the one to summit. The point was to be present to the dynamics of the experience. We weren’t going to play The Climb. We were going to live it.
Larp had caught my attention as an interesting subculture. No longer just a medium for nerds running around in the woods with swords, it was increasingly billed as a vehicle for deep emotional exploration and cultural experimentation. In addition to the traditional Viking, vampire and zombie scenarios, larps have been designed around serious themes – refugee crisis, gender, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, imprisonment. As someone who cares deeply about social change and personal transformation, that was exciting to me. Larps were said to let players experience particular emotions, to step into each other’s perspective, possibly even explore artistic and political visions for new forms of society. (...)
When the Belgian artist and scientist Angelo Vermeulen became the crew commander of HI-SEAS, a Mars mission simulation that had six pretend astronauts live for four months in a dome on a barren lava field in Hawaii, he was effectively engaged in a larp. During the mission, Vermeulen experimented with food production, leadership style (the crew rotated its leaders), and exercise regimes. NASA funded the research as a way of exploring future space‑colony design.
But why stop there? What if we had used role-playing games to model different approaches to banking and finance after the financial crisis? Or experiment with the use of crypto-currencies? What if we used pop-up temporary realities to explore the redistribution of resources or alternatives to the welfare state? At a time of growing alienation, larps can help us explore communitarian possibilities. Not ready to open your relationship, but interested in dabbling in non-monogamy? Try larping.
by Alexa Clay, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Peter Steffen/dpa/Corbis
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