Saturday, April 2, 2016
Can a Dress Shirt Be Racist?
In 2008, an entrepreneur named Seph Skerritt was frustrated with the way he shopped for clothes. Then a student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, he chafed at the time wasted while trying on garments in stores. Often, he thought, you settled on an ill-fitting item just to get the drudgery over with.
While on an internship in Asia, Skerritt had encountered the effortless magic of having a tailor custom-fit your shirt. Why not improve on that concept, he wondered, with an online service that fitted your shirts by asking you questions, and then mailed you the garments?
He christened his company Proper Cloth. Naysayers told him that when customers input their measurements, they often made mistakes — the idea wouldn’t scale. But Skerritt thought that guessing, even if one’s guesses were occasionally off, was still preferable to the chaos and disappointment experienced in a physical store.
So he set about developing an algorithm that could customize your shirt without needing a tape measure. As a check against errors in customers’ reported measurements, he thought up a list of basic questions — height, weight, and so on — that could serve as indicators of shirt size. Then, using these questions, he made shirts for 30 guys who worked at the New York City tech incubator hosting his startup, called Dogpatch Labs.
When the volunteers tried on their shirts, Skerritt quickly saw what worked and what didn’t. Asking about waist size was insufficient, for example, because it gave no indication of the size of one’s midsection. So Skerritt added a question about how far one’s belly protruded. Other questions were too confusing, like one about how T-shirts fit around your chest and shoulders. Those queries were omitted.
He noticed an odd pattern. In that first batch of 30, the shirts fit best on testers who were Caucasians. They seemed to fit worse, in a predictable way, on people who weren’t Caucasian. All subjects of one ancestry — Asian, say — seemed to require the same general alterations. Skerritt noted the anomaly and added a question on what he called “ethnicity”: Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, or “I’m not sure.” The question, Skerritt says, has proven invaluable to sizing his customers’ shirts.
There’s no denying the satisfaction of a smartly tailored shirt. But with this one question, the once mundane world of dress shirts is now dabbling in a kind of racial profiling. Are we ready to dredge up centuries of racial strife, simply for a perfect fit?
I bet you have two warring opinions of this web site’s “ethnicity” question. One is that we humans have a long history of buying clothes without explicitly considering our ancestry, so this innovation sounds, if not racist, at least racially inappropriate. The other is that, well, maybe our body types do differ by race — and just accepting this reality frees us from having to wrestle with the Caucasian body proportions that dominate most clothing design.
So here’s my question: With the “ethnicity” question, is this entrepreneur courageously addressing the proposition that we’re different according to our ancestry, and propelling us toward a post-racial future? Or is he pretending to be scientific as a marketing gimmick, while actually enforcing false, outdated and possibly dangerous ideas about race?
Past attempts to target clothing to an ethnicity have sparked some controversy. In 2007, for example, Nike launched a line of sneakers decorated with colorful geometric patterns and arrowhead designs for Native Americans, called Air Native N7. Native Americans had wider fore-feet, Nike claimed, and thus needed wider shoes.
But from the moment he heard about the shoes, Alan Goodman, a biological anthropologist at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., suspected that Nike’s science was weak.
Nike says it measured 224 Native Americans’ feet around the country before concluding that Native feet were wider in the front. Who was measured, Goodman wonders, how old were they, and what was their condition? Native Americans have double the risk of diabetes compared to the national average. Was Nike really selling colorful, “native” sneakers for swollen diabetic feet? Or as one online commentator put it, “If this isn’t an example of corporate manipulation of race, I don’t know what is.” (I reached out to Nike for a response, but never heard back.)
When I asked about Proper Cloth’s “ethnicity” question, Goodman had this to say: “Calling groups white or black is a pre-Darwinian view of biology that does not fit the facts of human variation.” Other anthropologists I spoke to also roundly denounced the question. Race, they say, is a social construct. (...)
For over a century, the U.S. military has measured incoming recruits’ bodies. In the Civil War, height, weight and BMI were used to determine physical fitness, and to exclude men with diseases, such as tuberculosis. In World War I, these measurements helped determine how much recruits could carry, and how far they could march.
After World War II, the importance of knowing recruits’ body shapes and sizes became apparent for other reasons: to properly fit soldiers into the machines that were now central to warfare. In what’s still cited as a notorious example of unfortunate design, some gun turrets for the B-17 bombers were so cramped that only the smallest crew members could sandwich their bodies into them, and in a semi-fetal position at that.
This series of measurements, comprising thousands of recruits, is known as ANSUR — the Army Anthropometry Survey. And it includes race. When I asked, anthropologists tended to pooh-pooh the dataset. Among other objections, they noted that military recruits were not a random sample of Americans. But I encountered a different opinion among industrial designers.
Matthew Reed, a researcher in anthropometry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, flat out called ANSUR the “best-gathered anthro data in the world.” Not only was the dataset accurate and reliable, in his view, it could save lives.
Imagine body armor that doesn’t completely cover your vital organs, or is too long or too short, making it horribly uncomfortable to wear, so you take it off. Imagine if you found yourself in a nerve gas attack and your mask doesn’t fit properly because it was designed for a different kind of face. (One study found that American-made gas masks fit poorly on “Chinese” faces.)
The differences in body type according to race could be striking. Reed sent me a graphic, based on data from the 1988 iteration of ANSUR, illustrating seated height versus standing height for Caucasian and African American men. Most African Americans had a shorter seated height compared to Caucasians of the same overall stature, meaning longer leg bones and shorter torsos. Asians, meanwhile, skewed slightly in the other direction, with taller sitting heights and longer torsos than both Caucasians and African-Americans.
The army doesn’t use this information to individually fit uniforms and gear, Reed explained, but to plan and manage costs. If the army knows that 15 percent of recruits are African American, when it orders, say, 20,000 bullet-proof vests, it will ensure that 15 percent conform to what it believes is their relatively shorter proportions. “That’s really important for the army,” Reed told me. “If you do that wrong, you end up with stuff that you need to store. And you don’t have enough of what you do need.”
Reed points out that race is also important in civilian contexts. Think about your car. Reed designs crash test dummies. If a car is tested only with “Caucasian” dummies, it may not be as safe for Asians or African Americans. Why? Leg length determines how far back you sit from the steering wheel — a major impact point — and your proximity to the airbag. Seated height also affects what you can see. “We don’t want to build a dummy that’s based only on white guys,” Reed said.
The point is not to design “black” or “Asian” dummies. Rather, it’s to ensure that the dummies you use are as diverse, in their body proportions, as you know the American population to be. In short, while some anthropologists argue that we should ditch the old race labels, Reed considers taking race into consideration good design practice.
by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Backchannel | Read more:
Image: Proper Cloth
While on an internship in Asia, Skerritt had encountered the effortless magic of having a tailor custom-fit your shirt. Why not improve on that concept, he wondered, with an online service that fitted your shirts by asking you questions, and then mailed you the garments?
He christened his company Proper Cloth. Naysayers told him that when customers input their measurements, they often made mistakes — the idea wouldn’t scale. But Skerritt thought that guessing, even if one’s guesses were occasionally off, was still preferable to the chaos and disappointment experienced in a physical store.So he set about developing an algorithm that could customize your shirt without needing a tape measure. As a check against errors in customers’ reported measurements, he thought up a list of basic questions — height, weight, and so on — that could serve as indicators of shirt size. Then, using these questions, he made shirts for 30 guys who worked at the New York City tech incubator hosting his startup, called Dogpatch Labs.
When the volunteers tried on their shirts, Skerritt quickly saw what worked and what didn’t. Asking about waist size was insufficient, for example, because it gave no indication of the size of one’s midsection. So Skerritt added a question about how far one’s belly protruded. Other questions were too confusing, like one about how T-shirts fit around your chest and shoulders. Those queries were omitted.
He noticed an odd pattern. In that first batch of 30, the shirts fit best on testers who were Caucasians. They seemed to fit worse, in a predictable way, on people who weren’t Caucasian. All subjects of one ancestry — Asian, say — seemed to require the same general alterations. Skerritt noted the anomaly and added a question on what he called “ethnicity”: Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, or “I’m not sure.” The question, Skerritt says, has proven invaluable to sizing his customers’ shirts.
There’s no denying the satisfaction of a smartly tailored shirt. But with this one question, the once mundane world of dress shirts is now dabbling in a kind of racial profiling. Are we ready to dredge up centuries of racial strife, simply for a perfect fit?
I bet you have two warring opinions of this web site’s “ethnicity” question. One is that we humans have a long history of buying clothes without explicitly considering our ancestry, so this innovation sounds, if not racist, at least racially inappropriate. The other is that, well, maybe our body types do differ by race — and just accepting this reality frees us from having to wrestle with the Caucasian body proportions that dominate most clothing design.
So here’s my question: With the “ethnicity” question, is this entrepreneur courageously addressing the proposition that we’re different according to our ancestry, and propelling us toward a post-racial future? Or is he pretending to be scientific as a marketing gimmick, while actually enforcing false, outdated and possibly dangerous ideas about race?
Past attempts to target clothing to an ethnicity have sparked some controversy. In 2007, for example, Nike launched a line of sneakers decorated with colorful geometric patterns and arrowhead designs for Native Americans, called Air Native N7. Native Americans had wider fore-feet, Nike claimed, and thus needed wider shoes.
But from the moment he heard about the shoes, Alan Goodman, a biological anthropologist at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., suspected that Nike’s science was weak.
Nike says it measured 224 Native Americans’ feet around the country before concluding that Native feet were wider in the front. Who was measured, Goodman wonders, how old were they, and what was their condition? Native Americans have double the risk of diabetes compared to the national average. Was Nike really selling colorful, “native” sneakers for swollen diabetic feet? Or as one online commentator put it, “If this isn’t an example of corporate manipulation of race, I don’t know what is.” (I reached out to Nike for a response, but never heard back.)
When I asked about Proper Cloth’s “ethnicity” question, Goodman had this to say: “Calling groups white or black is a pre-Darwinian view of biology that does not fit the facts of human variation.” Other anthropologists I spoke to also roundly denounced the question. Race, they say, is a social construct. (...)
For over a century, the U.S. military has measured incoming recruits’ bodies. In the Civil War, height, weight and BMI were used to determine physical fitness, and to exclude men with diseases, such as tuberculosis. In World War I, these measurements helped determine how much recruits could carry, and how far they could march.
After World War II, the importance of knowing recruits’ body shapes and sizes became apparent for other reasons: to properly fit soldiers into the machines that were now central to warfare. In what’s still cited as a notorious example of unfortunate design, some gun turrets for the B-17 bombers were so cramped that only the smallest crew members could sandwich their bodies into them, and in a semi-fetal position at that.
This series of measurements, comprising thousands of recruits, is known as ANSUR — the Army Anthropometry Survey. And it includes race. When I asked, anthropologists tended to pooh-pooh the dataset. Among other objections, they noted that military recruits were not a random sample of Americans. But I encountered a different opinion among industrial designers.
Matthew Reed, a researcher in anthropometry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, flat out called ANSUR the “best-gathered anthro data in the world.” Not only was the dataset accurate and reliable, in his view, it could save lives.
Imagine body armor that doesn’t completely cover your vital organs, or is too long or too short, making it horribly uncomfortable to wear, so you take it off. Imagine if you found yourself in a nerve gas attack and your mask doesn’t fit properly because it was designed for a different kind of face. (One study found that American-made gas masks fit poorly on “Chinese” faces.)
The differences in body type according to race could be striking. Reed sent me a graphic, based on data from the 1988 iteration of ANSUR, illustrating seated height versus standing height for Caucasian and African American men. Most African Americans had a shorter seated height compared to Caucasians of the same overall stature, meaning longer leg bones and shorter torsos. Asians, meanwhile, skewed slightly in the other direction, with taller sitting heights and longer torsos than both Caucasians and African-Americans.
The army doesn’t use this information to individually fit uniforms and gear, Reed explained, but to plan and manage costs. If the army knows that 15 percent of recruits are African American, when it orders, say, 20,000 bullet-proof vests, it will ensure that 15 percent conform to what it believes is their relatively shorter proportions. “That’s really important for the army,” Reed told me. “If you do that wrong, you end up with stuff that you need to store. And you don’t have enough of what you do need.”
Reed points out that race is also important in civilian contexts. Think about your car. Reed designs crash test dummies. If a car is tested only with “Caucasian” dummies, it may not be as safe for Asians or African Americans. Why? Leg length determines how far back you sit from the steering wheel — a major impact point — and your proximity to the airbag. Seated height also affects what you can see. “We don’t want to build a dummy that’s based only on white guys,” Reed said.
The point is not to design “black” or “Asian” dummies. Rather, it’s to ensure that the dummies you use are as diverse, in their body proportions, as you know the American population to be. In short, while some anthropologists argue that we should ditch the old race labels, Reed considers taking race into consideration good design practice.
by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Backchannel | Read more:
Image: Proper Cloth
Virtual Reality and Pornography: An X-rated Debate
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Lucian Leaves Universal
That’s right, starting July 14th Lucian Grainge will be working at Amazon.
Screw the French, Lucian’s sick of carrying the company, growing Universal’s market share yet still having little to show for it. He wants to make the big bucks, he wants some real power, so he’s moving to Seattle.
Well, not really, he’ll still be based in L.A., relationships are king, and Jeff Bezos is counting on Lucian to make Amazon Music a powerhouse.
That’s right, you’ll get everything Spotify offers for free. Well, not really, it’s just that it will FEEL free, which has been the goal since Napster. It’ll be baked into Amazon Prime, which gives you short shipping and video and so many perks. Furthermore, Amazon is on the cutting edge with its Echo, you can call up a song right now, they just need someone with music business expertise to show them the path forward.
Lucian never bought the canard that there would be competitors on the retail side, Lucian knows that online one player ends up with 70% market share. And during this run-up to subscription, now that Spotify’s got 30 million paying, and Apple 11, it’s time to double-down and go for the big money.
There will be a sunset on free. Even YouTube is going that way, did you notice that Peter Chernin’s Fullscreen is gonna charge $5 a month for ad-free content? That’s the future, you’re gonna pay, you just don’t know it yet. It’s just a matter of when. And rather than be hampered by the shortsighted artists and the small margins and low cash reserves of Universal, Lucian believes he can have a larger impact and get it right with Amazon. (...)
The rumor that Amazon will buy Spotify is untrue. It’s not Bezos’s style, he likes to grow products in-house, and after the failure of the Fire phone not only has quality control improved, but Jeff is now hands-on, sure, he cares about rockets and the “Washington Post,” but not as much as his baby. Amazon Web Services drives the bottom line, but on the consumer side, it’s free shipping and entertainment that bring people in. Bezos, unlike so many techies, understands the power of music. After all, he single-handedly tried to bring Layne Staley back from the brink.
You didn’t know that, but that’s how Bezos operates. One day you’re clueless, the next day you’re addicted to whatever Jeff is selling you.
So Lucian went for the power and the stock. He who has cash is king, he has leverage. And although Apple has deep pockets, Tim Cook is so busy with financial shenanigans Steve Jobs abhorred, selling bonds and granting dividends, that insiders joke that Apple is toast, there’s no cutting edge there, just endless variations on previous products.
And the abomination known as Apple Music. Which is so counterintuitive as to be nearly unusable. Amazon’s got 1-Click, Steve Jobs licensed it for the Apple Store, Bezos knows that usability is king, he won’t make Apple’s mistake. Furthermore, it appears that voice control will drive listening in the future and Echo is on the bleeding edge, it’s the market leader, it made Sonos blink, Lucian got a demo two years back and has been secretly meeting with Bezos ever since.
by Bob Lefsetz, Lefsetz Letter | Read more:
Image: Tumblr
Screw the French, Lucian’s sick of carrying the company, growing Universal’s market share yet still having little to show for it. He wants to make the big bucks, he wants some real power, so he’s moving to Seattle.
Well, not really, he’ll still be based in L.A., relationships are king, and Jeff Bezos is counting on Lucian to make Amazon Music a powerhouse.
That’s right, you’ll get everything Spotify offers for free. Well, not really, it’s just that it will FEEL free, which has been the goal since Napster. It’ll be baked into Amazon Prime, which gives you short shipping and video and so many perks. Furthermore, Amazon is on the cutting edge with its Echo, you can call up a song right now, they just need someone with music business expertise to show them the path forward.
Lucian never bought the canard that there would be competitors on the retail side, Lucian knows that online one player ends up with 70% market share. And during this run-up to subscription, now that Spotify’s got 30 million paying, and Apple 11, it’s time to double-down and go for the big money.There will be a sunset on free. Even YouTube is going that way, did you notice that Peter Chernin’s Fullscreen is gonna charge $5 a month for ad-free content? That’s the future, you’re gonna pay, you just don’t know it yet. It’s just a matter of when. And rather than be hampered by the shortsighted artists and the small margins and low cash reserves of Universal, Lucian believes he can have a larger impact and get it right with Amazon. (...)
The rumor that Amazon will buy Spotify is untrue. It’s not Bezos’s style, he likes to grow products in-house, and after the failure of the Fire phone not only has quality control improved, but Jeff is now hands-on, sure, he cares about rockets and the “Washington Post,” but not as much as his baby. Amazon Web Services drives the bottom line, but on the consumer side, it’s free shipping and entertainment that bring people in. Bezos, unlike so many techies, understands the power of music. After all, he single-handedly tried to bring Layne Staley back from the brink.
You didn’t know that, but that’s how Bezos operates. One day you’re clueless, the next day you’re addicted to whatever Jeff is selling you.
So Lucian went for the power and the stock. He who has cash is king, he has leverage. And although Apple has deep pockets, Tim Cook is so busy with financial shenanigans Steve Jobs abhorred, selling bonds and granting dividends, that insiders joke that Apple is toast, there’s no cutting edge there, just endless variations on previous products.
And the abomination known as Apple Music. Which is so counterintuitive as to be nearly unusable. Amazon’s got 1-Click, Steve Jobs licensed it for the Apple Store, Bezos knows that usability is king, he won’t make Apple’s mistake. Furthermore, it appears that voice control will drive listening in the future and Echo is on the bleeding edge, it’s the market leader, it made Sonos blink, Lucian got a demo two years back and has been secretly meeting with Bezos ever since.
by Bob Lefsetz, Lefsetz Letter | Read more:
Image: Tumblr
Friday, April 1, 2016
Dude, Where’s My City?
I tend to ignore the usual measurements of what makes a city robust and healthy, the urban bragging points. Along the West Coast, these superlatives roll out with regularity. Seattle, two years ago, was proclaimed the fastest growing city in the United States. San Francisco usually tops the list of most expensive places to live. And Portland, Ore., just posted the highest percentage rise in home prices among major cities.
This is great, for realtors and tax collectors. Hooray — we’re shiny, new and less affordable than most cities of the world! Try the kale smoothie.
I look for something else: Could Kramer still live in my city? Yeah, Kramer, the “Seinfeld” character who never held a real job, but had a fairly cool apartment. His source of income was suspect. His schemes were sitcom-absurd. His ambition was, I don’t know, to publish a coffee-table book about coffee tables.
Every town needs its Kramers. And in Seattle, where I was born and still live, where my grandmother spent her last days in subsidized housing with a view of Puget Sound, I’m afraid we’re losing ours.
Job growth is steroidal. The big urban carnivore is Amazon.com, with its global headquarters now gobbling up enough office space in the formerly funky South Lake Union district to fill almost two skyscrapers the size of the city’s tallest building, the 76-story Columbia Center. Twice that amount is in the pipeline, as Amazon seeks to become the world’s largest retailer. Google just announced grand plans for the same neighborhood. A metro area of 3.5 million is adding 60,000 people a year.
Growth, even the metastatic kind, is usually trumpeted with a lot of rah-rah. The opposite — the sad decline of a Detroit, a Cleveland or a Baltimore — is much worse. So who wouldn’t want the fresh money and talent flowing into the vibrant urban centers of the West Coast? Well, this city. And Portland. And San Francisco as well.
Rising rents threaten to push out the quirky and creative types who make these places eternally young and resilient. You saw the pattern in Brooklyn — that urban tipping point. An average wage earner living in Brooklyn would somehow have to spend 120 percent of his or her monthly income to make rent.
In the Bay Area, there’s a desperate effort to keep the last un-gentrified neighborhoods from being taken over by techies, a quixotic mission. In Portland, where young people go to retire, that Krameresque option is fading. What’s next: homeless hipsters in “Portlandia”? It’s already happening. And here in Seattle, it can seem like Amazon is a large foreign presence growing inside of us — a transplant that has yet to take.
by Timothy Egan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation
What will be the impact of automation efforts like these, multiplied many times across different sectors of the economy? Can we look forward to vast improvements in productivity, freedom from boring work, and improved quality of life? Should we fear threats to jobs, disruptions to organizations, and strains on the social fabric?Earlier this year, we launched research to explore these questions and investigate the potential that automation technologies hold for jobs, organizations, and the future of work.Our results to date suggest, first and foremost, that a focus on occupations is misleading. Very few occupations will be automated in their entirety in the near or medium term. Rather, certain activities are more likely to be automated, requiring entire business processes to be transformed, and jobs performed by people to be redefined, much like the bank teller’s job was redefined with the advent of ATMs.
More specifically, our research suggests that as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages. Although we often think of automation primarily affecting low-skill, low-wage roles, we discovered that even the highest-paid occupations in the economy, such as financial managers, physicians, and senior executives, including CEOs, have a significant amount of activity that can be automated.
by Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi, McKinsey Quarterly | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How Art Helped Me See the Beauty in Loneliness
You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others.
Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability to find as much intimacy as is desired.
I know what that feels like. I’ve been a citizen of loneliness. I’ve done my time in empty rooms. A few years back I moved to New York, drifting through a succession of sublet apartments. A new relationship had abruptly turned to dust and though I had friends in the city I was paralysed by loneliness. The feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether until the intensity diminished.
The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn’t have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed. (...)
I was by no means the only person who’d puzzled over these questions. All kinds of writers, artists, film-makers and songwriters have explored the subject of loneliness, attempting to gain purchase on it, to tackle the issues that it provokes. But I was at the time beginning to fall in love with images, to find a solace in them I didn’t find elsewhere, and so I conducted the majority of my investigations within the visual realm. I sought out artists who seemed to articulate or be troubled by loneliness, particularly as it manifests in cities.
The obvious place to start was with Edward Hopper, that rangy, taciturn man. Born at the tail end of the 19th century, he spent his working life documenting life in the electrically uneasy metropolis. Though he was often resistant to the notion that loneliness was his metier, his central theme, his scenes of men and women in deserted cafes, offices and hotel lobbies remain signature images of urban isolation.
Hopper’s people are often alone, or in fraught, uncommunicative groupings of twos and threes, fastened into poses that seem indicative of distress. But this isn’t the only reason his work is so deeply associated with loneliness. He also succeeds in capturing something of how it feels, by way of the strange construction of his city layouts.
Take Nighthawks, which the novelist Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”. It shows a diner at night: an urban aquarium, a glass cell. Inside, in their livid yellow prison, are four figures. A spivvy couple, a counter-boy in a white uniform, and a man sitting with his back to the window, the open crescent of his jacket pocket the darkest point on the canvas. No one is talking. No one is looking at anyone else. Is the diner a refuge for the isolated, a place of succour, or does it serve to illustrate the disconnection that proliferates in cities? The painting’s brilliance derives from its instability, its refusal to commit.I’d been looking at it on laptop screens for years before I finally saw it in person, at the Whitney one sweltering October afternoon. The colour hit me first. Green walls, green shadows falling in spikes and diamonds on the green sidewalk. There is no shade in existence that more powerfully communicates urban alienation than this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city of glass towers, empty illuminated offices and neon signs.
But it was the window that really stopped me in my tracks: a bubble of glass that separated the diner from the street, curving sinuously back against itself. It was impossible to gaze through into the luminous interior without experiencing a swift apprehension of loneliness, of how it might feel to be shut out, standing alone in the cooling air.
Glass is a persistent symbol of loneliness, and for good reason. Almost as soon as I arrived in the city, I had the sense that I was trapped behind glass. I couldn’t reach out or make contact, and at the same time I felt dangerously exposed, vulnerable to judgment, particularly in situations where being alone felt awkward or wrong, where I was surrounded by couples or groups.
This is what Hopper replicates with his strange architectural configurations: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with near-unbearable exposure. “I probably am a lonely one,” he once told an interviewer, and his paintings radiate an empathic understanding of what that’s like. You might think this would make his work distressing, but on the contrary I found it eased the burden of my own feelings. Someone else had grappled with loneliness, and had found beauty, even value in it.
by Olivia Laing, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Edward Hopper
The Best Time I Took My Baby to the Emergency Room
This is still a little too raw for me to really want to talk about it, but I got a bit of a guilt-nudge from yesterday’s post on criminalizing bad mothers.
All parents do something stupid at some point, and most of us get away with it. That’s the truth. Usually, it’s not doing meth while you’re pregnant, or putting your baby on top of a bear in Yellowstone so you can film it. But it’s something, and you usually get away with it. And if you get away with it, it’s a funny story, and you’ll eventually laugh about it with other parents. If you don’t get away with it, people will make themselves feel better about their own mistakes by pillorying you. But there’s no difference between people who do something stupid and get away with it, and people who don’t get away with it. It’s luck. Don’t kid yourself.
Me? I was making dinner, and I had my baby in a wide-based baby chair (not a Bumbo, for the record), on the kitchen island. Stable, wide-based. Not near the edge. I shouldn’t have done it. It’s on the packaging. Don’t do it. I was singing the Eagles’ “Take it Easy” to her, and I was chopping peppers, and then I heard a noise, and I looked up, and there was nothing on the island. She had somehow launched herself and the entire chair backwards off the four-foot-high island.
I wanted to kill myself. I remember thinking, very clearly, that if she died, I would have to kill myself. It was the worst moment of my life. I was filled with self-loathing, she was screaming, the chair partially broke her fall, but she obviously hit her head on the tile floor.
So I called 911. And the first thing they ask for is your address, and I started into this whole “I don’t even know if I should be calling, but my baby fell and hit her head” thing, and the very nice dispatcher just said “I know, I know, what’s your address?” And the paramedics were there in about ten minutes. And they were, again, very nice, and each of them, because it’s Utah, was about thirty years old and had six children, and six individual stories about how they almost killed their child, but didn’t, and it was okay. “I was holding my baby while drinking coffee, and dumped it on her leg.” “My baby reached out and touched the glass front of our gas fireplace and burned herself really badly.” “My daughter was tossing the baby in a blanket on the driveway and dropped him.” It was so kind. They told me she was beautiful, and that her vital signs were good, and that babies fall all the time, and that I in no way needed to kill myself.
All parents do something stupid at some point, and most of us get away with it. That’s the truth. Usually, it’s not doing meth while you’re pregnant, or putting your baby on top of a bear in Yellowstone so you can film it. But it’s something, and you usually get away with it. And if you get away with it, it’s a funny story, and you’ll eventually laugh about it with other parents. If you don’t get away with it, people will make themselves feel better about their own mistakes by pillorying you. But there’s no difference between people who do something stupid and get away with it, and people who don’t get away with it. It’s luck. Don’t kid yourself.
Me? I was making dinner, and I had my baby in a wide-based baby chair (not a Bumbo, for the record), on the kitchen island. Stable, wide-based. Not near the edge. I shouldn’t have done it. It’s on the packaging. Don’t do it. I was singing the Eagles’ “Take it Easy” to her, and I was chopping peppers, and then I heard a noise, and I looked up, and there was nothing on the island. She had somehow launched herself and the entire chair backwards off the four-foot-high island.I wanted to kill myself. I remember thinking, very clearly, that if she died, I would have to kill myself. It was the worst moment of my life. I was filled with self-loathing, she was screaming, the chair partially broke her fall, but she obviously hit her head on the tile floor.
So I called 911. And the first thing they ask for is your address, and I started into this whole “I don’t even know if I should be calling, but my baby fell and hit her head” thing, and the very nice dispatcher just said “I know, I know, what’s your address?” And the paramedics were there in about ten minutes. And they were, again, very nice, and each of them, because it’s Utah, was about thirty years old and had six children, and six individual stories about how they almost killed their child, but didn’t, and it was okay. “I was holding my baby while drinking coffee, and dumped it on her leg.” “My baby reached out and touched the glass front of our gas fireplace and burned herself really badly.” “My daughter was tossing the baby in a blanket on the driveway and dropped him.” It was so kind. They told me she was beautiful, and that her vital signs were good, and that babies fall all the time, and that I in no way needed to kill myself.
by Nicole Cliff, Hairpin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
‘Minimal’ Cell Raises Stakes in Race to Harness Synthetic Life
Genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter has created a synthetic cell that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism. Functioning with 473 genes, the cell is a milestone in his team’s 20-year quest to reduce life to its bare essentials and, by extension, to design life from scratch.
Venter, who has co-founded a company that seeks to harness synthetic cells for making industrial products, says that the feat heralds the creation of customized cells to make drugs, fuels and other products. But an explosion in powerful ‘gene-editing’ techniques, which enable relatively easy and selective tinkering with genomes, raises a niggling question: why go to the trouble of making new life forms when you can simply tweak what already exists?Unlike the first synthetic cells made in 2010, in which Venter’s team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, copied an existing bacterial genome and transplanted it into another cell, the genome of the minimal cells is like nothing in nature. Venter says that the cell, which is described in a paper released on 24 March inScience, constitutes a brand new, artificial species.
“The idea of building whole genomes is one of the dreams and promises of synthetic biology,” says Paul Freemont, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London, who is not involved in the work.
The design and synthesis of genomes from scratch remains a niche pursuit, and is technically demanding. By contrast, the use of genome editing is soaring — and its most famous tool, CRISPR–Cas9, has already gained traction in industry, agriculture and medicine, notes George Church, a genome scientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who works with CRISPR. “With much less effort, CRISPR came around and suddenly there are 30,000 people practising CRISPR, if not more.”
Microbiologists were just starting to characterize the bacterial immune system that scientists would eventually co-opt and name CRISPR when Venter’s team began its effort to whittle life down to its bare essentials. In a 1995 Science paper, Venter’s team sequenced the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmitted microbe with the smallest genome of any known free-living organism3, and mapped its 470 genes. By inactivating genes one by one and testing to see whether the bacterium could still function, the group slimmed this list down to 375 genes that seemed essential.
by Ewen Callaway, Nature | Read more:
Image: homas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman/NCMIR/UCSD
Friday, March 25, 2016
Microsoft's Twitter Chat Robot Quickly Devolves Into Racist, Homophobic, Nazi, Obama-Bashing Psychopath
Two months ago, Stephen Hawking warned humanity that its days may be numbered: the physicist was among over 1,000 artificial intelligence experts who signed an open letter about the weaponization of robots and the ongoing "military artificial intelligence arms race."
Overnight we got a vivid example of just how quickly "artificial intelligence" can spiral out of control when Microsoft's AI-powered Twitter chat robot, Tay, became a racist, misogynist, Obama-hating, antisemitic, incest and genocide-promoting psychopath when released into the wild.
For those unfamiliar, Tay is, or rather was, an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. It was meant to be a bot anyone can talk to online. The company described the bot as “Microsoft’s A.I. fam the internet that’s got zero chill!."
Microsoft initially created "Tay" in an effort to improve the customer service on its voice recognition software. According to MarketWatch, "she” was intended to tweet “like a teen girl” and was designed to “engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation.”
The chat algo is able to perform a number of tasks, like telling users jokes, or offering up a comment on a picture you send her, for example. But she’s also designed to personalize her interactions with users, while answering questions or even mirroring users’ statements back to them.
This is where things quickly turned south.
Overnight we got a vivid example of just how quickly "artificial intelligence" can spiral out of control when Microsoft's AI-powered Twitter chat robot, Tay, became a racist, misogynist, Obama-hating, antisemitic, incest and genocide-promoting psychopath when released into the wild.For those unfamiliar, Tay is, or rather was, an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. It was meant to be a bot anyone can talk to online. The company described the bot as “Microsoft’s A.I. fam the internet that’s got zero chill!."
Microsoft initially created "Tay" in an effort to improve the customer service on its voice recognition software. According to MarketWatch, "she” was intended to tweet “like a teen girl” and was designed to “engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation.”
The chat algo is able to perform a number of tasks, like telling users jokes, or offering up a comment on a picture you send her, for example. But she’s also designed to personalize her interactions with users, while answering questions or even mirroring users’ statements back to them.
This is where things quickly turned south.
by Tyler Durden, Zerohedge | Read more:
Image: Twitter
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Starving
Set in a nameless country at an undisclosed time in history, “The Hunger Artist” concerns a man who starves himself not for his art—as the old adage goes—but as a form of art. His abstinence becomes fodder for public consumption. In the opening pages, we’re told that the hunger artist travels to little hamlets and villages across the country, where he puts on performances in town squares. For forty days at a time, he sits inside a barred metal cage whose floor has been padded with straw, and sips from a thimble of water, not as a form of nourishment but rather to “moisten his lips.” Hordes of eager spectators peer into his kennel and gawk at his deprivation—the protuberant ribcage, the twiggy limbs, the gaunt and phlegmatic expression. But as the days wear on and tastes change, the crowds thin. Enthusiasm wanes. Soon, out of financial desperation and artistic despair, the hunger artist parts ways with his loyal publicist and joins a circus, the last venue where he can procure a stage for himself, however shabby and undignified it may be. “In order to spare his own sensitive feelings, he didn’t even look at the terms of his contract.”
Upon his arrival at the circus, he’s stationed at the far end of the grounds, amidst a menagerie of loud, squawking animals that prove to be more compelling to the guests than the sight of a rail-thin man sitting immobile in worsted vestments. From his vantage inside the cage, he can observe a collection of garishly painted signs advertising other exhibits, which contrast starkly with the drab interior of his own dwelling—the iron bars, the coarse straw, the pale skin. Eventually, people forget about him, even neglecting to change the number on the tablet outside his cage that denotes the duration of his fast.
One day a supervisor totters past the exhibit, seeing only a mound of hay, and asks a nearby attendant why a perfectly good cage is going to waste. Eventually, one member of the grounds crew recalls the presence of the professional faster, prompting everyone to start jabbing at the straw with poles until they locate the skimpy frame of the hunger artist, who rouses slowly. The conversation that ensues is the coda of the story:
In the century since its publication, the story has spawned countless interpretations. Numerous critics have pointed out its obvious Christian allusions. Because the hunger artist’s fasts transpire over a period of forty days, they situate him beside other biblical figures, whose own crucibles of faith spanned the same length of time—Moses at Sinai waiting for the commandments; Jesus in the desert, brushing off the devil. And yet, ideologically, Kafka was anything but an apostle. Clearly he didn’t intend for the hunger artist to stand as a simple Christlike symbol. Nowhere is this more apparent than when the impresario calls the hunger artist an “unfortunate martyr,” which Kafka qualifies with a telling parenthetical: “something the hunger artist certainly was, only in a completely different sense.”
There are, of course, two senses in which one can be a martyr: when one is killed for one’s religious beliefs or when one embellishes their suffering in order to garner the condolence or commendation of others. Throughout the story, the hunger artist professes no article of faith, no strident political position. Instead, he’s monomaniacally preoccupied with being respected and adored, which gives us good reason to believe that Kafka wants us to regard him in the second, more pejorative sense of the term. The hunger artist’s claim at the end of the story that he “couldn’t find a food that tasted good” to him is hard to take literally. Instead, it seems to signal that his only nourishment—the only sustenance he hungered for—was approval and veneration. The fickleness of the public proved to be a meager diet, though, and since he had nothing else to live on, he wasted away to a husk of skin and bones. He was, quite literally, starved for attention.
It can be counted on that at some point during the discussion of Kafka, one of my students will mention the Kardashian family. The first time the conversation veered in this direction, I was somewhat baffled. But it turns out that for a particular segment of young people, the most immediate contemporary analogue to the hunger artist are celebrities who have made a career not from any particular talent or ability, but rather on their identity alone—the kind of celebrities who have transcended the realm of personalities—and perhaps personhood itself. (...)
I never lasted long on social media—there were a few weeks back in 2004 when I used Facebook, a dark period during which I also wore an eyebrow ring and still had hair—so its operations invariably feel exotic to me. Whenever my friends log on, I always jump at the chance to look over their shoulders and read their newsfeeds, trying to get a sense of its interpersonal flavor. But even though its codes and mores strike me as queer and foreign, I don’t bring to these investigations the bigoted attitude of a xenophobe nor the unalterable nostalgia of a Luddite. I’m genuinely curious about the potential benefits of expressing myself and curating my own life online. Surely, there are social advantages. And for a writer there are professional ones, too.
By now, the fact that Facebook conventions mirror the undertakings of celebrities—the meticulously curated profiles, the group-tested posts written in press-release diction, the endless photos of our friends’ meals, their leisure activities, their dogs (it’s true, “the stars are just like us”—in fact, they are us)—is usually acknowledged with sheepish embarrassment. We cop to our self-promotion and blush upon admitting that, yes, okay, it’s true: we do in fact take down Facebook posts or Instagram pics that don’t garner enough likes or favorites. We do sometimes, when polling our “friends,” address them this way: “Dear Facebook” or “Dear Hivemind.” But we defend against these minor humiliations of personhood by suggesting that they’re required by our neoliberal landscape. Perhaps the wisdom of Citizens United can be applied in reverse: yes, corporations are individuals, but individuals are corporations, too.
But when we regard our “selves” this way—as a product to be marketed, a message to be promulgated, a brand to be “liked”—something strange happens. We begin to feel the gathering pangs of a clenched inauthenticity, which accrues ever more quickly under the pressure to keep up appearances, to apply yet another coat of varnish to the surface of our brand. We may feel lonely or “unknown” in ways we could never admit. Of course, all social roles are inescapably performative, and it would be naïve to think that we can totally avoid the dramaturgy of self-presentation simply by staying offline. But in the age of wearable technology, push notifications and selfie sticks, it has become difficult to adequately distinguish between our virtual and visceral selves, to know when exactly the curtain closes and the backstage begins. Kafka notes that toward the end of his life, malnourished by a thankless audience, the hunger artist never leaves the circus. It is perhaps no accident that the site of his exhibit, the very proscenium of his performance, is also a cage.
by Barrett Swanson, The Point | Read more:
Image: Kim Kardashian
Upon his arrival at the circus, he’s stationed at the far end of the grounds, amidst a menagerie of loud, squawking animals that prove to be more compelling to the guests than the sight of a rail-thin man sitting immobile in worsted vestments. From his vantage inside the cage, he can observe a collection of garishly painted signs advertising other exhibits, which contrast starkly with the drab interior of his own dwelling—the iron bars, the coarse straw, the pale skin. Eventually, people forget about him, even neglecting to change the number on the tablet outside his cage that denotes the duration of his fast.One day a supervisor totters past the exhibit, seeing only a mound of hay, and asks a nearby attendant why a perfectly good cage is going to waste. Eventually, one member of the grounds crew recalls the presence of the professional faster, prompting everyone to start jabbing at the straw with poles until they locate the skimpy frame of the hunger artist, who rouses slowly. The conversation that ensues is the coda of the story:
“Forgive me everything,” whispered the hunger artist. Only the supervisor, who was pressing his ear up against the cage, understood him. “Certainly,” said the supervisor, tapping his forehead with his finger in order to indicate to the staff the state the hunger artist was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist. “Just look at you,” said the supervisor, “why can’t you do anything else?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food that tasted good to me. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.”These are his last words. Upon his death, the cage is promptly evacuated, and he is replaced by a young panther, a lithe creature who prowls the confines of his tenement and has no trouble enjoying the food the guards bring him.
In the century since its publication, the story has spawned countless interpretations. Numerous critics have pointed out its obvious Christian allusions. Because the hunger artist’s fasts transpire over a period of forty days, they situate him beside other biblical figures, whose own crucibles of faith spanned the same length of time—Moses at Sinai waiting for the commandments; Jesus in the desert, brushing off the devil. And yet, ideologically, Kafka was anything but an apostle. Clearly he didn’t intend for the hunger artist to stand as a simple Christlike symbol. Nowhere is this more apparent than when the impresario calls the hunger artist an “unfortunate martyr,” which Kafka qualifies with a telling parenthetical: “something the hunger artist certainly was, only in a completely different sense.”
There are, of course, two senses in which one can be a martyr: when one is killed for one’s religious beliefs or when one embellishes their suffering in order to garner the condolence or commendation of others. Throughout the story, the hunger artist professes no article of faith, no strident political position. Instead, he’s monomaniacally preoccupied with being respected and adored, which gives us good reason to believe that Kafka wants us to regard him in the second, more pejorative sense of the term. The hunger artist’s claim at the end of the story that he “couldn’t find a food that tasted good” to him is hard to take literally. Instead, it seems to signal that his only nourishment—the only sustenance he hungered for—was approval and veneration. The fickleness of the public proved to be a meager diet, though, and since he had nothing else to live on, he wasted away to a husk of skin and bones. He was, quite literally, starved for attention.
It can be counted on that at some point during the discussion of Kafka, one of my students will mention the Kardashian family. The first time the conversation veered in this direction, I was somewhat baffled. But it turns out that for a particular segment of young people, the most immediate contemporary analogue to the hunger artist are celebrities who have made a career not from any particular talent or ability, but rather on their identity alone—the kind of celebrities who have transcended the realm of personalities—and perhaps personhood itself. (...)
I never lasted long on social media—there were a few weeks back in 2004 when I used Facebook, a dark period during which I also wore an eyebrow ring and still had hair—so its operations invariably feel exotic to me. Whenever my friends log on, I always jump at the chance to look over their shoulders and read their newsfeeds, trying to get a sense of its interpersonal flavor. But even though its codes and mores strike me as queer and foreign, I don’t bring to these investigations the bigoted attitude of a xenophobe nor the unalterable nostalgia of a Luddite. I’m genuinely curious about the potential benefits of expressing myself and curating my own life online. Surely, there are social advantages. And for a writer there are professional ones, too.
By now, the fact that Facebook conventions mirror the undertakings of celebrities—the meticulously curated profiles, the group-tested posts written in press-release diction, the endless photos of our friends’ meals, their leisure activities, their dogs (it’s true, “the stars are just like us”—in fact, they are us)—is usually acknowledged with sheepish embarrassment. We cop to our self-promotion and blush upon admitting that, yes, okay, it’s true: we do in fact take down Facebook posts or Instagram pics that don’t garner enough likes or favorites. We do sometimes, when polling our “friends,” address them this way: “Dear Facebook” or “Dear Hivemind.” But we defend against these minor humiliations of personhood by suggesting that they’re required by our neoliberal landscape. Perhaps the wisdom of Citizens United can be applied in reverse: yes, corporations are individuals, but individuals are corporations, too.
But when we regard our “selves” this way—as a product to be marketed, a message to be promulgated, a brand to be “liked”—something strange happens. We begin to feel the gathering pangs of a clenched inauthenticity, which accrues ever more quickly under the pressure to keep up appearances, to apply yet another coat of varnish to the surface of our brand. We may feel lonely or “unknown” in ways we could never admit. Of course, all social roles are inescapably performative, and it would be naïve to think that we can totally avoid the dramaturgy of self-presentation simply by staying offline. But in the age of wearable technology, push notifications and selfie sticks, it has become difficult to adequately distinguish between our virtual and visceral selves, to know when exactly the curtain closes and the backstage begins. Kafka notes that toward the end of his life, malnourished by a thankless audience, the hunger artist never leaves the circus. It is perhaps no accident that the site of his exhibit, the very proscenium of his performance, is also a cage.
by Barrett Swanson, The Point | Read more:
Image: Kim Kardashian
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
‘Fitbit For Your Period’: The Rise of Fertility Tracking
Will Sacks did not plan to go into the menstruation business. When he travelled from Toronto to Reno to attend his first Burning Man festival in August 2009, he only knew that he needed a change. At the age of 29, he was having a personal crisis. “I had forgotten that I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he told me earlier this year. “I had forgotten that I wanted to create a company that could put a dent in the universe.” He quit his job as an energy efficiency consultant, shut down the small online business he had been running on the side, and booked a plane ticket to the desert.
Before beginning the drive to Burning Man from Reno airport, Sacks posted a message on Craigslist offering a ride in his rental car to anyone who needed one. A young woman named Kati Bicknell answered. Petite and pale, with thick brown hair, Bicknell looks like she stepped out of a pre‑Raphaelite painting. She exudes an intense, slightly mischievous, energy. Sacks comes across as calmer. He locks eyes when he talks to you, pausing every few sentences to check in: are you still with him? Does his optimism sound naive?
Bicknell had flown to Reno from New York, where she had a job at TED Talks. The drive to Burning Man became the beginning of a shared mythology. After the gathering ended, Sacks and Bicknell dated long distance, taking overnight buses between Toronto and New York. One weekend in November, they found themselves having “the birth control conversation”.
“We had been dating for three months,” Bicknell told me not long ago. “He said, ‘I don’t love wearing condoms and I was wondering whether you would be willing to go on the pill.’ I said … ‘No!’”
“I was relatively unenlightened at that point,” Sacks conceded, “and Kati got pissed.” Bicknell thought it was “bullshit” that the burden of birth control always fell on women. She suggested that her boyfriend get a vasectomy. Sacks balked. Then she brought up an alternative he had never heard of: the fertility awareness method (FAM). Fertility awareness involves regularly tracking certain physiological signs in order to determine when a woman can conceive and when she cannot.
Bicknell had always taken a strong interest in fertility. Her mother was one of over two million American women fitted with the Dalkon Shield in the early 1970s, a defective intrauterine device that caused hundreds of thousands of patients to suffer infections, miscarriages, and other serious problems; Bicknell grew up hearing how hard she had been to conceive. Ever since she began menstruating at 11, Bicknell had experienced highly irregular periods. No doctor ever investigated why; they simply put her on the pill.
In her 20s, Bicknell became concerned that the “fake period” the pill gave her every 28 days was masking a health problem that she should know about. A roommate gave her a copy of a book titled Taking Charge of Your Fertility, by a nurse named Toni Weschler. It is the bible of the fertility awareness method. By the time she met Sacks, Bicknell had already been practising it for three years.
“Fertility charting is this thing I’m already doing that can be used to prevent pregnancy,” Bicknell told Sacks that night in November 2009. “It’s just the kind of cool, nerdy thing you would be super into.” As she explained how it worked, Sacks became more and more stunned by his own ignorance.
“I had an engineering degree and thought I knew everything,” he told me. “I was blown away. On the one hand I was shocked and dismayed that I had been under this totally false understanding of how women’s bodies work. On the other, I was like, ‘Wow, there’s a side-effect free, hormone-free, form of birth control.’”
“This is a technology that can change the world,” Sacks thought. Bicknell agreed. That winter, they decided to ditch their jobs and move to Panama together. They rented a house near the ocean, took freelance gigs to pay the bills and spent the rest of their time in a hammock, poring over scientific studies and beginning work on their business pitch. When they returned north, they filed preliminary patents for an app that would make it easier for couples to practise fertility awareness.
They did not know how hard it would be to translate their ideas into a company. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Bicknell recalled, “and we didn’t even know it.”
In 1990, Carl Djerassi, one of the biochemists who created the oral contraceptive pill, predicted that the invention that had made him rich and famous could soon become obsolete. In an article in Science magazine, Djerassi explained that recent advances in his field had made it possible to track changes in blood hormone levels simply by taking samples of saliva or urine. This meant that, using simple cheek swabs, women could accurately predict the days when they could become pregnant. If they did so, taking the synthetic hormones that he had developed would become unnecessary. But Djerassi thought it was unlikely that fertility tracking would replace the pill. Why? Powerful pharmaceutical companies had a huge interest in pushing the pill. As for tracking, nobody had figured out how to make money from it.
For around 20 years, nobody did. But today, the market in “smart wearables” is booming. Biosensors connected to phones and other mobile devices make it easy to record, store, and analyse data about your body and behaviours. Apart from “activity trackers” – which record information about how many steps you take each day, how many stairs you climb, calories you burn, and so on – fertility trackers are the most frequently downloaded kind of health app in the Apple Store.
Fertility awareness apps have an enormous potential market: women from puberty to menopause. The industries that they could disrupt are huge, too. A 2013 study by Transparency Market Research estimated that in 2018, women worldwide will spend $23.3bn on contraceptives. Americans also spend $5bn a year on assisted reproductive technology treatments – at least some of which fertility awareness advocates say they could avoid, if they and their doctors paid closer attention to their bodies.
by Moira Weigel, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Bratislav Milenkovic
Before beginning the drive to Burning Man from Reno airport, Sacks posted a message on Craigslist offering a ride in his rental car to anyone who needed one. A young woman named Kati Bicknell answered. Petite and pale, with thick brown hair, Bicknell looks like she stepped out of a pre‑Raphaelite painting. She exudes an intense, slightly mischievous, energy. Sacks comes across as calmer. He locks eyes when he talks to you, pausing every few sentences to check in: are you still with him? Does his optimism sound naive?
Bicknell had flown to Reno from New York, where she had a job at TED Talks. The drive to Burning Man became the beginning of a shared mythology. After the gathering ended, Sacks and Bicknell dated long distance, taking overnight buses between Toronto and New York. One weekend in November, they found themselves having “the birth control conversation”.“We had been dating for three months,” Bicknell told me not long ago. “He said, ‘I don’t love wearing condoms and I was wondering whether you would be willing to go on the pill.’ I said … ‘No!’”
“I was relatively unenlightened at that point,” Sacks conceded, “and Kati got pissed.” Bicknell thought it was “bullshit” that the burden of birth control always fell on women. She suggested that her boyfriend get a vasectomy. Sacks balked. Then she brought up an alternative he had never heard of: the fertility awareness method (FAM). Fertility awareness involves regularly tracking certain physiological signs in order to determine when a woman can conceive and when she cannot.
Bicknell had always taken a strong interest in fertility. Her mother was one of over two million American women fitted with the Dalkon Shield in the early 1970s, a defective intrauterine device that caused hundreds of thousands of patients to suffer infections, miscarriages, and other serious problems; Bicknell grew up hearing how hard she had been to conceive. Ever since she began menstruating at 11, Bicknell had experienced highly irregular periods. No doctor ever investigated why; they simply put her on the pill.
In her 20s, Bicknell became concerned that the “fake period” the pill gave her every 28 days was masking a health problem that she should know about. A roommate gave her a copy of a book titled Taking Charge of Your Fertility, by a nurse named Toni Weschler. It is the bible of the fertility awareness method. By the time she met Sacks, Bicknell had already been practising it for three years.
“Fertility charting is this thing I’m already doing that can be used to prevent pregnancy,” Bicknell told Sacks that night in November 2009. “It’s just the kind of cool, nerdy thing you would be super into.” As she explained how it worked, Sacks became more and more stunned by his own ignorance.
“I had an engineering degree and thought I knew everything,” he told me. “I was blown away. On the one hand I was shocked and dismayed that I had been under this totally false understanding of how women’s bodies work. On the other, I was like, ‘Wow, there’s a side-effect free, hormone-free, form of birth control.’”
“This is a technology that can change the world,” Sacks thought. Bicknell agreed. That winter, they decided to ditch their jobs and move to Panama together. They rented a house near the ocean, took freelance gigs to pay the bills and spent the rest of their time in a hammock, poring over scientific studies and beginning work on their business pitch. When they returned north, they filed preliminary patents for an app that would make it easier for couples to practise fertility awareness.
They did not know how hard it would be to translate their ideas into a company. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Bicknell recalled, “and we didn’t even know it.”
In 1990, Carl Djerassi, one of the biochemists who created the oral contraceptive pill, predicted that the invention that had made him rich and famous could soon become obsolete. In an article in Science magazine, Djerassi explained that recent advances in his field had made it possible to track changes in blood hormone levels simply by taking samples of saliva or urine. This meant that, using simple cheek swabs, women could accurately predict the days when they could become pregnant. If they did so, taking the synthetic hormones that he had developed would become unnecessary. But Djerassi thought it was unlikely that fertility tracking would replace the pill. Why? Powerful pharmaceutical companies had a huge interest in pushing the pill. As for tracking, nobody had figured out how to make money from it.
For around 20 years, nobody did. But today, the market in “smart wearables” is booming. Biosensors connected to phones and other mobile devices make it easy to record, store, and analyse data about your body and behaviours. Apart from “activity trackers” – which record information about how many steps you take each day, how many stairs you climb, calories you burn, and so on – fertility trackers are the most frequently downloaded kind of health app in the Apple Store.
Fertility awareness apps have an enormous potential market: women from puberty to menopause. The industries that they could disrupt are huge, too. A 2013 study by Transparency Market Research estimated that in 2018, women worldwide will spend $23.3bn on contraceptives. Americans also spend $5bn a year on assisted reproductive technology treatments – at least some of which fertility awareness advocates say they could avoid, if they and their doctors paid closer attention to their bodies.
by Moira Weigel, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Bratislav Milenkovic
Apple is Boring Now
Apple has in a few short years gone from a company with a sharp product focus to one that will seemingly produce any device in any size or color. In a recent question-and-answer session on Reddit, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak worried that Apple is following the market, rather than leading it:
I worry a little bit about – I mean I love my Apple Watch, but – it’s taken us into a jewelry market where you’re going to buy a watch between $500 or $1100 based on how important you think you are as a person. The only difference is the band in all those watches. Twenty watches from $500 to $1100. The band’s the only difference? Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally, or the company that really changed the world a lot. So it might be moving, but you’ve got to follow, you know. You’ve got to follow the paths of where the markets are.Apple now sells 55 different Apple Watch bands and watches made out of five different materials, in two sizes. (That’s not to mention the myriad Hermès and Edition versions it also sells.) Apple sells iPads infive sizes and three colors, and has five iPhones in three sizes and four colors. It has laptops with 11, 12, 13 and 15-inch screens, some of which are available in multiple colors.
Apple used to make one great phone, and a few great laptops and iPods. While there was some variation among those products, we could count on Apple to announce some Big New Thing at a slick press event every year in California. Now Apple’s innovations are just Apple products in every size and shape you can think of. While it may make good business sense to make a variety of versions for a variety of people, it’s not like these things have gotten cheaper or more accessible. Samsungreportedly makes 26 different tablets, each with different screen sizes to capture just about everyone who might possibly want a tablet. Is Apple, the world’s most profitable company, now chasing the business model of Samsung?
The (potentially apocryphal) quote from Henry Ford sums up where Apple seems to be heading: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Apple products are still generally high quality—although some would argue the quality of its software is falling—and they still sell well, but there’s less that differentiates them from their competition. What do Apple products now offer that Samsung’s don’t?
Last month, Samsung announced its latest flagship smartphones, and tech journalists generally agreed that Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge phone is the best Android phone on the market. Some say it’s simply the best phone. Its camera is the best phone camera I’ve ever used. Other than the some annoying additional bloatware that Samsung and mobile carriers installed on the device, the phone itself is as satisfying as an iPhone 6S.
Apple just isn’t offering much to differentiate itself. New releases are just updates of past models, or the same device, but a bit thinner or nimbler. It launched the iPad Pro because it saw the Microsoft Surface; it launched the iPhone 6 Plus because it saw the Samsung Galaxy Note phablets; it launched the Apple Watch because it saw Android Wear and Fitbit and Jawbone. Apple used to be able to convince people they needed something they hadn’t even imagined, whether that was 1,000 songs in their pocket, or a talking watch. This year or next, Apple will almost certainly announce the following:
- The iPhone 7
- The Apple Watch 2
- The MacBook 2
- The iPad Pro 2
- A new iMac
- A new Mac Mini
- A new Apple TV
by Mike Murphy, Quartz | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
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