Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Teaching Men to Be Emotionally Honest
Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.?” Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: “Don’t cry!… Aw, big boy! High five, high five! Say you’re a man: ‘I’m a man!’ ” The video ends with the whimpering toddler screwing up his face in anger and pounding his chest. “I’m a man!” he barks through tears and gritted teeth.
The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger. More immediately, it captured, in profound concision, the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself.
This is no small thing. As students discover in this course, an Honors College seminar called “Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity,” what boys seem to need is the very thing they fear. Yet when they are immunized against this deeper emotional honesty, the results have far-reaching, often devastating consequences.
Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes.
In many ways, the young men who take my seminar — typically, 20 percent of the class — mirror national trends. Based on their grades and writing assignments, it’s clear that they spend less time on homework than female students do; and while every bit as intelligent, they earn lower grades with studied indifference. When I asked one of my male students why he didn’t openly fret about grades the way so many women do, he said: “Nothing’s worse for a guy than looking like a Try Hard.”
In a report based on the 2013 book “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools,” the sociologists Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann observe: “Boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure. In fact, boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these cultural activities are often denigrated as un-masculine by preadolescent and adolescent boys.”
Throughout elementary school and beyond, they write, girls consistently show “higher social and behavioral skills,” which translate into “higher rates of cognitive learning” and “higher levels of academic investment.”
It should come as no surprise that college enrollment rates for women have outstripped men’s. In 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, 63 percent of females and 61 percent of males enrolled in college right after high school; by 2012, the percentage of young women had increased to 71, but the percentage of men remained unchanged.
By the time many young men do reach college, a deep-seated gender stereotype has taken root that feeds into the stories they have heard about themselves as learners. Better to earn your Man Card than to succeed like a girl, all in the name of constantly having to prove an identity to yourself and others.
The course “Real Men Smile,” which examines how the perceptions of masculinity have and haven’t changed since the 18th century, grew out of a provocative lecture by Michael Kimmel, the seminal researcher and author in the growing field of masculine studies.
Dr. Kimmel came to my campus, Towson University, in 2011 to discuss the “Bro Code” of collegiate male etiquette. In his talk, he deconstructed the survival kit of many middle-class, white male students: online pornography, binge drinking, a brotherhood in which respect is proportional to the disrespect heaped onto young women during hookups, and finally, the most ubiquitous affirmation of their tenuous power, video games.
As Dr. Kimmel masterfully deflected an outpouring of protests, the atmosphere grew palpably tense. A young man wearing fraternity letters stood up. “What you don’t get right is that girls are into hooking up as much as we are; they come on to us, too,” he said. Dr. Kimmel shook his head, which left the student clearly rattled.
His voice quavering, the young man stammered something unexpected from a frat brother, about how women can be as insensitive and hurtful as guys. He sounded like a victim himself. But afterward, when I asked him if he had reached out to any of his guy friends for advice or solace, he stared at me, incredulous, his irises two small blue islands amid a sea of sclera. “Nah, I’ve got this,” he said.
The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger. More immediately, it captured, in profound concision, the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself.This is no small thing. As students discover in this course, an Honors College seminar called “Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity,” what boys seem to need is the very thing they fear. Yet when they are immunized against this deeper emotional honesty, the results have far-reaching, often devastating consequences.
Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes.
In many ways, the young men who take my seminar — typically, 20 percent of the class — mirror national trends. Based on their grades and writing assignments, it’s clear that they spend less time on homework than female students do; and while every bit as intelligent, they earn lower grades with studied indifference. When I asked one of my male students why he didn’t openly fret about grades the way so many women do, he said: “Nothing’s worse for a guy than looking like a Try Hard.”
In a report based on the 2013 book “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools,” the sociologists Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann observe: “Boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure. In fact, boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these cultural activities are often denigrated as un-masculine by preadolescent and adolescent boys.”
Throughout elementary school and beyond, they write, girls consistently show “higher social and behavioral skills,” which translate into “higher rates of cognitive learning” and “higher levels of academic investment.”
It should come as no surprise that college enrollment rates for women have outstripped men’s. In 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, 63 percent of females and 61 percent of males enrolled in college right after high school; by 2012, the percentage of young women had increased to 71, but the percentage of men remained unchanged.
By the time many young men do reach college, a deep-seated gender stereotype has taken root that feeds into the stories they have heard about themselves as learners. Better to earn your Man Card than to succeed like a girl, all in the name of constantly having to prove an identity to yourself and others.
The course “Real Men Smile,” which examines how the perceptions of masculinity have and haven’t changed since the 18th century, grew out of a provocative lecture by Michael Kimmel, the seminal researcher and author in the growing field of masculine studies.
Dr. Kimmel came to my campus, Towson University, in 2011 to discuss the “Bro Code” of collegiate male etiquette. In his talk, he deconstructed the survival kit of many middle-class, white male students: online pornography, binge drinking, a brotherhood in which respect is proportional to the disrespect heaped onto young women during hookups, and finally, the most ubiquitous affirmation of their tenuous power, video games.
As Dr. Kimmel masterfully deflected an outpouring of protests, the atmosphere grew palpably tense. A young man wearing fraternity letters stood up. “What you don’t get right is that girls are into hooking up as much as we are; they come on to us, too,” he said. Dr. Kimmel shook his head, which left the student clearly rattled.
His voice quavering, the young man stammered something unexpected from a frat brother, about how women can be as insensitive and hurtful as guys. He sounded like a victim himself. But afterward, when I asked him if he had reached out to any of his guy friends for advice or solace, he stared at me, incredulous, his irises two small blue islands amid a sea of sclera. “Nah, I’ve got this,” he said.
by Andrew Reiner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ben Wiseman
Monday, April 4, 2016
How a Small Tech Site Found a New Way for Publishers to Get Paid
[ed. If you've never visited the Wirecutter, you should really check it out.]
Lam’s website, the Wirecutter, has become a Consumer Reports for the digital age, albeit with a unique model -- it posts in-depth reviews of gadgets, embeds links to buy them on e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, and takes a cut of the sales. The site has a staff of about 60 and posts only a few dozen articles a month, yet it’s profitable. Last year, the Wirecutter drove $150 million in e-commerce transactions, Lam said.
“We move as much product as a place 10 times bigger than us in terms of audience,” Lam said in an interview. “That’s because people trust us. We earn that trust by having such deeply-researched articles.”In recent months, several publishers including BuzzFeed Inc. and Hearst Corp. have started testing the Wirecutter’s strategy, known as affiliate marketing, as the traditional model of driving clicks to boost advertising dollars comes under pressure.
Some publishers have seen their U.S. Internet traffic growth flatten as the Web matures and websites proliferate. Meanwhile, more readers are adopting “ad blockers” to avoid annoying marketing messages that slow loading speeds and drain phone batteries. And brands are increasingly buying online display advertising -- such as banner ads -- via automated exchanges, creating an abundance of supply that depresses prices that publishers can charge, said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research.
“Publishers know that advertising is a difficult business to be in if you’re not named Facebook and Google,” Wieser said. “You can grow your audience, but in a deflationary environment, you have to run just to stand still.”
Lam sees less conflict of interest in profiting from the sale of products he recommends than in traditional Web advertising. The Wirecutter, which does carry some ads, has an incentive to help readers buy the best gadgets because it doesn’t get paid if they return them, while many media outlets get paid by posting “click bait” that disappoints readers, he said.
“If someone buys something off our site that we recommend, and they hate it, we get nothing,” Lam said. “So the more we help readers the better our business does.” (...)
When Lam started the Wirecutter in 2011, his strategy wasn’t completely new. Bloggers had supported themselves for years by reviewing products and taking a cut of sales. The Wirecutter was the first mainstream outlet to make that its primary model, said Lam, a former editor at Gawker’s technology site Gizmodo and Conde Nast’s Wired magazine.
Unlike many digital media startups, the Wirecutter has no outside investors. And its traffic is relatively small: it had 622,000 unique U.S. visitors in February, according to ComScore, a fraction of major tech websites like the Verge. The Wirecutter isn’t focused on traffic. It wants readers to buy products it recommends, so it takes its time, Lam said.
Each Wirecutter post takes between 20 to 200 hours of research and testing. In many cases, the site enlists the help of engineers, chemists and scientists. While reviewing the best bike locks, it received input from an actual bike thief, according to the company’s website. While testing waterproof iPhone cases, one of its employees swam a quarter of a mile in the ocean. The Wirecutter recently expanded its profile by teaming with the New York Times to test ways to preserve smartphone battery life and Wi-Fi routers.
No gadget is too obscure for reviewing, Lam said, citing a “really random” piece his site did on the best windshield wipers.
“You wouldn’t think it makes a difference,” said Lam, who realized he didn’t have streaks on his windshield in a year. “I didn’t know that windshield wipers could annoy me so little.”
by Gerry Smith, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Wirecutter
The Next Big Thing
Asked to name an event that has reshaped finance in recent years, bankers will point to the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15th 2008, the nadir of the financial crisis. Fintech types are more likely to mention something that happened six weeks later. On October 31st 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous cryptography buff whose real identity remains a mystery, unveiled a project he dubbed bitcoin, “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party”. It described what appeared to be a robust framework for a currency that could run without the backing of any government. Enthusiasts proclaimed that finance was about to enter the era of crypto-currencies. Since the need for a trusted third party has traditionally been a large part of the banks’ raison d’être, this could mean that in future they will no longer be required—potentially a much more radical change than the other inroads fintech has made on their business.
Six-and-a-half years on, the bankers may feel they can relax a little. Interest in bitcoin has waned. After spiking at $1,100 in November 2013, its value has dropped to $225 (see chart). A few online retailers and trendy coffee bars accept it, but its yo-yoing value is one reason why its use in the legitimate economy is barely measurable (though it remains a favourite with drug-dealers). The general public has not forsaken cash or credit cards.
Interest in the underlying mechanics of the currency, however, has continued to grow. The technological breakthroughs that made bitcoin possible, using cryptography to organise a complex network, fascinate leading figures in Silicon Valley. Many of them believe parts of Mr Nakamoto’s idea can be recycled for other uses. The “blockchain” technology that underpins bitcoin, a sort of peer-to-peer system of running a currency, is presented as a piece of innovation on a par with the introduction of limited liability for corporations, or private property rights, or the internet itself.
In essence, the blockchain is a giant ledger that keeps track of who owns how much bitcoin. The coins themselves are not physical objects, nor even digital files, but entries in the blockchain ledger: owning bitcoin is merely having a claim on a piece of information sitting on the blockchain.
The same could be said of how a bank keeps track of how much money is kept in each of its accounts. But there the similarities end. Unlike a bank’s ledger, which is centralised and private, the blockchain is public and distributed widely. Anyone can download a copy of it. Identities are protected by clever cryptography; beyond that the system is entirely transparent.
As well as keeping track of who owns bitcoin today, the blockchain is a record of who has owned every bitcoin since its inception. Units of currency are transferred from one party to another as part of a new “block” of transactions added to the existing chain—hence the name. New blocks are tacked on to the blockchain every ten minutes or so, extending it by a few hundred lines (it is already over 8,000 times the length of the Bible).
The proposed transactions contained in new blocks do not have to be approved by some central arbiter, as in conventional banking. Rather, a large number of computers dedicate themselves to keeping the system running. Rewards are high enough for vast data centres across the world to want to participate. Known as “miners”, they authenticate transactions by reaching a consensus on what the latest version of the blockchain should look like. In exchange, they are given newly minted bitcoin.
Chaining blocks together sequentially prevents anyone spending the same bitcoin twice, a bane of previous digital currencies. And the system is beyond tampering by any one party. Unlike a bank ledger, which can be altered by its owner (or a government), the blockchain cannot be changed without simultaneously overwriting all of the thousands of copies used by the miners at any one time. The definitive version of the blockchain is whatever a majority of the participating computers accepts. None of them is connected to any centralised organisation. There is no bitcoin central bank to sway them. To overwhelm the system, someone would need to control 51% of the computing capacity of the 10,000 or so “miners”—not impossible but unlikely.
This system of consensus by distributed co-operation sounds complicated, but it allows something of value to be transferred from one person to another without a middleman to verify the transaction. Fans think this is a way of changing the centralised, institution-dominated shape of modern finance. It is genuinely new. The question is whether it is useful.
Six-and-a-half years on, the bankers may feel they can relax a little. Interest in bitcoin has waned. After spiking at $1,100 in November 2013, its value has dropped to $225 (see chart). A few online retailers and trendy coffee bars accept it, but its yo-yoing value is one reason why its use in the legitimate economy is barely measurable (though it remains a favourite with drug-dealers). The general public has not forsaken cash or credit cards.Interest in the underlying mechanics of the currency, however, has continued to grow. The technological breakthroughs that made bitcoin possible, using cryptography to organise a complex network, fascinate leading figures in Silicon Valley. Many of them believe parts of Mr Nakamoto’s idea can be recycled for other uses. The “blockchain” technology that underpins bitcoin, a sort of peer-to-peer system of running a currency, is presented as a piece of innovation on a par with the introduction of limited liability for corporations, or private property rights, or the internet itself.
In essence, the blockchain is a giant ledger that keeps track of who owns how much bitcoin. The coins themselves are not physical objects, nor even digital files, but entries in the blockchain ledger: owning bitcoin is merely having a claim on a piece of information sitting on the blockchain.
The same could be said of how a bank keeps track of how much money is kept in each of its accounts. But there the similarities end. Unlike a bank’s ledger, which is centralised and private, the blockchain is public and distributed widely. Anyone can download a copy of it. Identities are protected by clever cryptography; beyond that the system is entirely transparent.
As well as keeping track of who owns bitcoin today, the blockchain is a record of who has owned every bitcoin since its inception. Units of currency are transferred from one party to another as part of a new “block” of transactions added to the existing chain—hence the name. New blocks are tacked on to the blockchain every ten minutes or so, extending it by a few hundred lines (it is already over 8,000 times the length of the Bible).
The proposed transactions contained in new blocks do not have to be approved by some central arbiter, as in conventional banking. Rather, a large number of computers dedicate themselves to keeping the system running. Rewards are high enough for vast data centres across the world to want to participate. Known as “miners”, they authenticate transactions by reaching a consensus on what the latest version of the blockchain should look like. In exchange, they are given newly minted bitcoin.
Chaining blocks together sequentially prevents anyone spending the same bitcoin twice, a bane of previous digital currencies. And the system is beyond tampering by any one party. Unlike a bank ledger, which can be altered by its owner (or a government), the blockchain cannot be changed without simultaneously overwriting all of the thousands of copies used by the miners at any one time. The definitive version of the blockchain is whatever a majority of the participating computers accepts. None of them is connected to any centralised organisation. There is no bitcoin central bank to sway them. To overwhelm the system, someone would need to control 51% of the computing capacity of the 10,000 or so “miners”—not impossible but unlikely.
This system of consensus by distributed co-operation sounds complicated, but it allows something of value to be transferred from one person to another without a middleman to verify the transaction. Fans think this is a way of changing the centralised, institution-dominated shape of modern finance. It is genuinely new. The question is whether it is useful.
by The Economist | Read more:
Image: Satoshi Kamayashi
What's Going On?
[ed. Wow. Some really explosive (...one hopes) revelations over the last few days. Conspiracy theories aside, it's curious why these leaks are occurring just now.]
Massive email leak reveals the worst bribery scandal in history
Image: Banksy
Sunday, April 3, 2016
The Psychological Effects of Image Overload
Twenty-four percent of U.S. teens say they’re online “almost constantly.” Now much of that time, it seems, is spent incessantly compiling and navigating vast collections and streams of images.
In a 2014 survey, the photo sharing app Instagram supplanted Twitter as the social media platform considered “most important” by U.S. teens.
These results stayed the same for 2015, confirming just how crucial image sharing and consumption have become to young people’s everyday online experiences. Not surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter have since become more image-driven. And Snapchat – which enables users to create and share ephemeral photographs and short videos – is one of the fastest-growing social networks.
Indeed, our relationship with photographs is rapidly changing. As we snap, store and communicate with thousands of images on our phones and computers, a number of researchers and theorists are already beginning to point to some of the unintended consequences of this “image overload,” which range from heightened anxiety to memory impairment.
by Rebecca Macmillan, The Conversation | Read more:
Image: Penelope Umbrico
In a 2014 survey, the photo sharing app Instagram supplanted Twitter as the social media platform considered “most important” by U.S. teens.These results stayed the same for 2015, confirming just how crucial image sharing and consumption have become to young people’s everyday online experiences. Not surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter have since become more image-driven. And Snapchat – which enables users to create and share ephemeral photographs and short videos – is one of the fastest-growing social networks.
Indeed, our relationship with photographs is rapidly changing. As we snap, store and communicate with thousands of images on our phones and computers, a number of researchers and theorists are already beginning to point to some of the unintended consequences of this “image overload,” which range from heightened anxiety to memory impairment.
Overwhelmed – and distracted – by images
In the Rhetoric of Photography course that I’ve taught at the University of Texas at Austin over the past few years, image glut was a constant topic of discussion among my students.
They repeatedly expressed feeling overrun by photographs and addicted to posting images. They even waxed nostalgic about the clunky plastic cameras of their childhoods, wistfully recalling the days of limited exposures and a waiting period before seeing their developed prints.
“Images are produced, commodified, made public and circulated on an unprecedented scale,” sociologist Martin Hand writes in his book Ubiquitous Photography.
Image overload hinges on feeling visually saturated – the sense that because there’s so much visual material to see, remembering an individual photograph becomes nearly impossible.
For my students, this feeling was marked at times by general frustration, low-grade anxiety and flat-out fatigue. Image overload also suggests a level of exhaustion with the process of monitoring and creating photo streams – surviving the pressure to digitally document one’s everyday life and to bear witness to others’ ever-growing image banks.
Many accumulate thousands of images on their phones and digital cameras. The daunting task of organizing, altering and deleting these can evoke feelings of dread. Indeed, according to a 2015 report, the average smartphone user has 630 photos stored on his or her device.
In the Rhetoric of Photography course that I’ve taught at the University of Texas at Austin over the past few years, image glut was a constant topic of discussion among my students.
They repeatedly expressed feeling overrun by photographs and addicted to posting images. They even waxed nostalgic about the clunky plastic cameras of their childhoods, wistfully recalling the days of limited exposures and a waiting period before seeing their developed prints.
“Images are produced, commodified, made public and circulated on an unprecedented scale,” sociologist Martin Hand writes in his book Ubiquitous Photography.
Image overload hinges on feeling visually saturated – the sense that because there’s so much visual material to see, remembering an individual photograph becomes nearly impossible.
For my students, this feeling was marked at times by general frustration, low-grade anxiety and flat-out fatigue. Image overload also suggests a level of exhaustion with the process of monitoring and creating photo streams – surviving the pressure to digitally document one’s everyday life and to bear witness to others’ ever-growing image banks.
Many accumulate thousands of images on their phones and digital cameras. The daunting task of organizing, altering and deleting these can evoke feelings of dread. Indeed, according to a 2015 report, the average smartphone user has 630 photos stored on his or her device.
by Rebecca Macmillan, The Conversation | Read more:
Image: Penelope Umbrico
Scientists Slowly Reintroducing Small Group Of Normal, Well-Adjusted Humans Into Society
According to officials at Cornell University, where for the past 18 years conservation researchers have operated an enclosed sanctuary for humans who are levelheaded and make it a habit to think before they speak, the endangered group is being cautiously reintegrated into select locations nationwide in hopes that they can reestablish permanent communities and one day thrive again.
“We’ve worked for years to stabilize our society’s dwindling population of sane, generally reasonable people, and within the safe confines of our refuge we’ve finally seen their numbers start to bounce back a little,” said Josh Adelson, head of the Cornell research team, which moved the remaining members of the group into a protected habitat in 1998 to keep them from dying off completely. “Now, we can very gradually begin to release this rare breed of rational humans back into the general public. With luck, they can survive and prosper.”
“Our hope is that within a century or so, the traits for making sound long-term decisions and being able to tolerate people different from oneself will propagate and begin to reemerge within the species at large,” he continued.
Prior to the conservation efforts, it is believed that even-tempered people with sound judgment and the ability to put the needs of others before themselves had dwindled to less than 150 within the country’s borders, and had gone completely extinct in the nation’s businesses and civic institutions. Experts widely agree that without isolation, protection, and captive-breeding programs, the remaining thoughtful, foresighted individuals would have been totally wiped out.
“We’ve worked for years to stabilize our society’s dwindling population of sane, generally reasonable people, and within the safe confines of our refuge we’ve finally seen their numbers start to bounce back a little,” said Josh Adelson, head of the Cornell research team, which moved the remaining members of the group into a protected habitat in 1998 to keep them from dying off completely. “Now, we can very gradually begin to release this rare breed of rational humans back into the general public. With luck, they can survive and prosper.”
“Our hope is that within a century or so, the traits for making sound long-term decisions and being able to tolerate people different from oneself will propagate and begin to reemerge within the species at large,” he continued.
Prior to the conservation efforts, it is believed that even-tempered people with sound judgment and the ability to put the needs of others before themselves had dwindled to less than 150 within the country’s borders, and had gone completely extinct in the nation’s businesses and civic institutions. Experts widely agree that without isolation, protection, and captive-breeding programs, the remaining thoughtful, foresighted individuals would have been totally wiped out.
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
FAA Considering Commercial Drone Flights Over People
[ed. Maybe they'll be made of rubber.]
The Federal Aviation Administration currently prohibits most commercial drone flights over populated areas, especially crowds. That ban frustrates a host of industries that want to take advantage of the technology."Every TV station in the country wants one, but they can't be limited to flying in the middle of nowhere because there's no news in the middle of nowhere," said Jim Williams, a former head of FAA's drone office who now advises the industry for Dentons, an international law firm.
Cellular network providers also want to loosen restrictions so drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, can inspect cell towers, which often are in urban areas. Amazon's vision for package deliveries entails drones winging their way over city and suburban neighborhoods.
The AP obtained a copy of the recommendations, which were sent to the FAA late Friday. The agency is not bound by the recommendations and can make changes when it writes final rules.
The recommendations call for creating four categories of small drones that commercial operators can fly over people, including crowds in some cases.
The first category of drones would weigh no more than about a half-pound. They essentially could fly unrestricted over people, including crowds. Drone makers would have to certify that if the drone hit someone, there would be no more than a 1 percent chance that the maximum force of the impact would cause a serious injury.
For the three other categories, the drones would have to fly at least 20 feet over the heads of people and keep a distance of at least 10 feet laterally from someone.
by Joan Lowy, AP | Read more:
Image: via:
The Augmented Human Being
Some of the things that we want people to worry about, in an enabling way these days going forward, are a lot of new applications of a new technology: CRISPR. (...)
Basically, there is no organism on the planet that I know of that somebody has tried that it doesn’t work in now, which is not true for every editing method. This editing method, you could say, is just a little more efficient and a lot cheaper. That makes it sound like it’s increment, but every now and then if it’s a sufficiently large increment, it’s transformative. Most people who are familiar with it are classifying it as transformative.
When you look at the applications of it beyond engineering human stem cells, which we showed first thing, you can do gene therapy with greater precision; that’s the most obvious thing. A little less obvious is you can engineer agricultural species in such a way that many governments are now classifying it as not a genetically modified organism. This is a big deal, and it shouldn’t be a big deal; it should be a minor bureaucratic footnote.
Because of people willfully ignoring scientific studies on safety, they draw this sharp line between genetically modified and not, especially for foods. Even the most ardent anti-GM are still pro-GM if it’s life and death; like genetically modified insulin, where you grow human insulin in bacteria. But we’ll come back to that. Those two things are the more obvious ones: human gene therapy that's more precise and efficient than ever, and agricultural.
Less obvious and fewer groups working on it is gene drives, which can be used to eliminate any vector-borne disease—malaria, dengue, lime disease—as well as invasive species like rodents that are killing off precious, endangered species on hundreds of islands worldwide and mainlands. That’s gene drives.
Then transplantation: going from pigs to humans. There are a million people in need of transplants, which are not limited just by incompatibility between people; there are just not enough people. Even if we were all compatible, there are not enough donors. Pigs offered that possibility, but there were two problems. One is the immune incompatibility, and the other is they had endogenous viruses. We have used CRISPR to solve both of those problems.
Then there is ecosystem manipulation. In addition to gene drives, you can address the isolation of a species’ elements: territories shrinking, getting divided by roads and other human artifacts—farms, and so forth, so that they become inbred. When species are inbred, they become less robust, less fertile, and that can be found by another revolution we’ve been involved in, which is "next generation sequencing," or reading the genome. You can now insert, using CRISPR, the proper more fertile and more robust version of the genes, or generate greater diversity.
Some of that diversity you can bring in not only from adjacent populations that are separated by manmade structures, but also diversity separated by time. You can bring in DNA from the ancient, extinct versions of these animals, near relatives, because this amazing next generation sequencing is so inexpensive and powerful that we can reach back up to 700,000 years into the past and get accurate sequences of long-extinct species, but with potentially very valuable lessons for modern ecosystems.
New technologies do change our perception of ourselves. It used to be new discoveries, and it still is; it’s integrating. If you have a new technology like a telescope, it can cause a discovery about where our planet sits in the universe—whether it’s at the center or not—but more and more frequently in the present, we have new technologies.
Sometimes people ask me why everybody is so worked up about applying CRISPR to the germline of humans. They’re not worked up particularly about applying it to the germline of animals. We just got approval for genetically modified salmon, and plants have been genetically modified for many years now. Even though some people will eat it and some people won’t, the fact is it’s a multibillion dollar business.
Why are humans special? You could say we have the Food and Drug Administration (in multiple countries) that makes sure every new medical technology, whether it’s a medical device or pharmaceutical has to be safe and effective. It does you no good to have a drug that’s safe but does nothing, nor having one that’s very effective but kills people.
What is it that makes germline manipulation of humans special? It's what you were just getting at—our perception of ourselves. If we feel that we can change any aspect of ourselves, where do you begin and where do you stop? and who sets those rules?
When you’re in a more primitive phase of the technology, you don’t have to ask that question because it seems so far off. We can only make minor changes: a little nip-and-tuck, cure a few vaccines; it doesn’t fundamentally change human nature. But if you ever did get a tool where you could fundamentally change human nature to anything you wanted—any hybrid with any animal properties that you like, hybridization with your inorganic machines that’s more intimate than it is now—that changes our view of ourselves. I guess that’s why people not only want more caution than ever before, which I would concur. They want maybe so much caution that it can never happen. There are many technologies that get banned at one point or another; it’s not unusual. Railroads were banned because trains were colliding with one another, sometimes in the middle of towns. (...)
There are now 2000 gene therapies where you’ll take a little piece of engineered DNA, put it inside of a viral coat so all the viral genes are gone, and you can put in, say, a human gene or you can have nonviral delivery, but the important thing is that you’re delivering it either inside of the human or you’re taking cells out of the human and putting the DNA in and then putting them back in. But you can do very powerful things like curing inherited diseases, curing infectious diseases.
For example, you can edit out the receptor for the HIV virus and cure AIDS patients in a way that's not dependent upon vaccines and multidrug resistance, which has plagued the HIV AIDS story from the very beginning. You’re basically making a human being which is now augmented in a certain sense so that, unlike most humans, they are resistant to this major plague of mankind—HIV AIDS.
There are now people walking around who are genetically modified. There are some that are resistant to AIDS because they have had their T cells, or more generally, their blood cells modified. There are children that have been cured of blindness by gene therapy. None of this is CRISPR, but it’s in the same vein. CRISPR is overtaking it very quickly and it’s drafting behind all the beautiful work that’s been done with delivery of DNA, delivery of genetic components to patients. (...)
Some of the questions that come up with Revive and Restore, of using cutting edge molecular technologies for ecosystem conservation and preservation, some of the same questions come up as come up with using these molecular technologies in medicine, which is who gets to choose? who decides? Are people not being heard or not being invited to sit to talk? (...)
The question of who decides ultimately with these kind of transparent and open projects, where it’s not being done in secret like the Manhattan Project, is —society decides. We vote with our wallets, we vote with the free enterprise system, with our politics, the power of the pen, and in some cases, we may change our mind later. There's an emphasis on things that are reversible—those get higher priority.
But eventually, we do irreversible things.
by George Church, Edge | Read more:
Image: via:
Johnson & Johnson Has a Baby Powder Problem
Jacqueline Fox worked in restaurant kitchens and school cafeterias, cleaned people’s houses, watched their kids, raised a son, and took in two foster children. She was careful about her appearance and liked to tend the garden in front of her home in Birmingham, Alabama. She had been treated for high blood pressure, arthritis, and diabetes, but, at 59, she was feeling pretty good. In the spring of 2013, her poodle, Dexter, began acting strangely. He’d jump on her, he’d cry, he’d stay close by all day. Fox happened to watch a television program about a dog that sensed its owner was unwell. When she let Dexter sniff her, he whined even more.
A week later, Fox was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. She had chemotherapy to shrink the tumors and surgery to remove her uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and part of her spleen and colon. In December of that year, she saw a commercial from an Alabama law firm, Beasley Allen, suggesting a connection between long-term use of Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder and ovarian cancer. Fox had been sprinkling Baby Powder made from talc on her underwear every day since she was a teen. “I was raised up on it,” she later said in a deposition. “They was to help you stay fresh and clean. … We ladies have to take care of ourselves.” It was as normal as using toothpaste or deodorant. “We both were a bit skeptical at first,” says her son, Marvin Salter, a mortgage banker in Jacksonville, Fla. “It has to be safe. It’s put on babies. It’s been around forever. Why haven’t we heard about any ill effects?”
Fox died from the cancer in October 2015. Four months later, a jury in St. Louis concluded that talcum powder contributed to the development of the disease and that Johnson & Johnson was liable for negligence, conspiracy, and failure to warn women of the potential risk of using Baby Powder in the genital area. The verdict, decided by a 10-2 vote, included $10 million in compensatory damages and $62 million in punitive damages, more than Fox’s lawyers had recommended. Salter bowed his head and wept.
“People were using something they thought was perfectly safe,” he says. “And it isn’t. At least give people the choice. J&J didn’t give people a choice.” Among the most painful revelations, he says, was that in the 1990s, even as the company acknowledged concerns in the health community, it considered increasing its marketing efforts to black and Hispanic women, who were already buying the product in high numbers. Fox was black. The jury foreman, Krista Smith, says internal documents provided the most incriminating evidence: “It was really clear they were hiding something.” She wanted to award the Fox family even more. Imerys Talc America, the biggest talc supplier in the country and the sole source of the powder for J&J, was also named as a defendant. The company wasn’t found liable. (...)
Talc is the softest mineral on earth, able to absorb odors and moisture. It’s composed of magnesium, silicon, and oxygen and is mined, usually from deposits above ground, in more than a dozen countries. It’s used in eye shadow and blush and chewing gum, but mostly it’s used in ceramics, paint, paper, plastic, and rubber. China is the biggest source; Johnson & Johnson’s supply comes from the southern province of Guangxi.
Johnson & Johnson began selling Baby Powder more than 100 years ago, soon after the company was founded in New Brunswick, N.J. Among its first products were adhesives infused with pain relievers such as mustard seed, capsicum, quinine, and opium. When customers complained that removing the plasters left them with skin irritation, J&J’s scientific director sent them small containers of talc to help soothe any rashes. A few reported that the talc also seemed to ease diaper rash. In 1894 the company introduced Baby Powder, made of 99.8 percent talc and sold in a metal tin labeled “for toilet and nursery.”
The other 0.2 percent is a mix of fragrant oils. Smell is evocative, and this particular scent is mingled with powerful memories—a marketer’s dream. “It’s calming, nurturing. … It doesn’t grab your senses. It wafts,” Fred Tewell, a J&J executive, told the Associated Press in 2008. The company has said that in blind tests, the scent of Baby Powder is recognized more often than that of chocolate, coconut, or mothballs. From the early 1900s, J&J tried to persuade women to use the powder on themselves, too. Ads in 1913 included the tag line, “Best for Baby, Best for You.” By 1965, when Fox was 12 years old, ads featured a sultry woman sprinkling talc on her bare shoulder. No baby is in sight. “Want to feel cool, smooth and dry? It’s as easy as taking powder from a baby.” Two decades later, the company told the New York Times Magazine that 70 percent of its Baby Powder was used by adults. Sales of J&J’s talcum powder products came to about $374 million in 2014, according to Euromonitor. That’s not essential to a $70 billion company that makes most of its money selling medical devices and drugs. But without Baby Powder, J&J may not have developed Baby Oil or Baby Shampoo nor have a baby division worth some $2 billion. Baby Powder’s value to the company extends well beyond sales.
Forty-five years ago, British researchers analyzed 13 ovarian tumors and found talc particles “deeply embedded” in 10. The study, published in 1971, was the first to raise the possibility that talcum powder could pose a risk. In 1982 a study in the journal Cancer by Daniel Cramer, an epidemiologist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, showed the first statistical link between genital talc use and ovarian cancer. Soon after, Cramer received a call from Bruce Semple, an executive at J&J. The two met in Boston. “Dr. Semple spent his time trying to convince me that talc use was a harmless habit, while I spent my time trying to persuade him to consider the possibility that my study could be correct and that women should be advised of this potential risk of talc,” Cramer, a paid expert and witness for the plaintiffs, said in a 2011 court filing. “I don’t think this was a question of money,” he says now. “I think it was pride of ownership. Baby Powder is a signature product for J&J.”
Baby Powder is considered a cosmetic, which doesn’t need to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration under the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
by Susan Berfield, Jef Feeley, and Margaret Cronin Fisk, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Travis Rathbone
A week later, Fox was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. She had chemotherapy to shrink the tumors and surgery to remove her uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and part of her spleen and colon. In December of that year, she saw a commercial from an Alabama law firm, Beasley Allen, suggesting a connection between long-term use of Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder and ovarian cancer. Fox had been sprinkling Baby Powder made from talc on her underwear every day since she was a teen. “I was raised up on it,” she later said in a deposition. “They was to help you stay fresh and clean. … We ladies have to take care of ourselves.” It was as normal as using toothpaste or deodorant. “We both were a bit skeptical at first,” says her son, Marvin Salter, a mortgage banker in Jacksonville, Fla. “It has to be safe. It’s put on babies. It’s been around forever. Why haven’t we heard about any ill effects?”Fox died from the cancer in October 2015. Four months later, a jury in St. Louis concluded that talcum powder contributed to the development of the disease and that Johnson & Johnson was liable for negligence, conspiracy, and failure to warn women of the potential risk of using Baby Powder in the genital area. The verdict, decided by a 10-2 vote, included $10 million in compensatory damages and $62 million in punitive damages, more than Fox’s lawyers had recommended. Salter bowed his head and wept.
“People were using something they thought was perfectly safe,” he says. “And it isn’t. At least give people the choice. J&J didn’t give people a choice.” Among the most painful revelations, he says, was that in the 1990s, even as the company acknowledged concerns in the health community, it considered increasing its marketing efforts to black and Hispanic women, who were already buying the product in high numbers. Fox was black. The jury foreman, Krista Smith, says internal documents provided the most incriminating evidence: “It was really clear they were hiding something.” She wanted to award the Fox family even more. Imerys Talc America, the biggest talc supplier in the country and the sole source of the powder for J&J, was also named as a defendant. The company wasn’t found liable. (...)
Talc is the softest mineral on earth, able to absorb odors and moisture. It’s composed of magnesium, silicon, and oxygen and is mined, usually from deposits above ground, in more than a dozen countries. It’s used in eye shadow and blush and chewing gum, but mostly it’s used in ceramics, paint, paper, plastic, and rubber. China is the biggest source; Johnson & Johnson’s supply comes from the southern province of Guangxi.
Johnson & Johnson began selling Baby Powder more than 100 years ago, soon after the company was founded in New Brunswick, N.J. Among its first products were adhesives infused with pain relievers such as mustard seed, capsicum, quinine, and opium. When customers complained that removing the plasters left them with skin irritation, J&J’s scientific director sent them small containers of talc to help soothe any rashes. A few reported that the talc also seemed to ease diaper rash. In 1894 the company introduced Baby Powder, made of 99.8 percent talc and sold in a metal tin labeled “for toilet and nursery.”
The other 0.2 percent is a mix of fragrant oils. Smell is evocative, and this particular scent is mingled with powerful memories—a marketer’s dream. “It’s calming, nurturing. … It doesn’t grab your senses. It wafts,” Fred Tewell, a J&J executive, told the Associated Press in 2008. The company has said that in blind tests, the scent of Baby Powder is recognized more often than that of chocolate, coconut, or mothballs. From the early 1900s, J&J tried to persuade women to use the powder on themselves, too. Ads in 1913 included the tag line, “Best for Baby, Best for You.” By 1965, when Fox was 12 years old, ads featured a sultry woman sprinkling talc on her bare shoulder. No baby is in sight. “Want to feel cool, smooth and dry? It’s as easy as taking powder from a baby.” Two decades later, the company told the New York Times Magazine that 70 percent of its Baby Powder was used by adults. Sales of J&J’s talcum powder products came to about $374 million in 2014, according to Euromonitor. That’s not essential to a $70 billion company that makes most of its money selling medical devices and drugs. But without Baby Powder, J&J may not have developed Baby Oil or Baby Shampoo nor have a baby division worth some $2 billion. Baby Powder’s value to the company extends well beyond sales.
Forty-five years ago, British researchers analyzed 13 ovarian tumors and found talc particles “deeply embedded” in 10. The study, published in 1971, was the first to raise the possibility that talcum powder could pose a risk. In 1982 a study in the journal Cancer by Daniel Cramer, an epidemiologist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, showed the first statistical link between genital talc use and ovarian cancer. Soon after, Cramer received a call from Bruce Semple, an executive at J&J. The two met in Boston. “Dr. Semple spent his time trying to convince me that talc use was a harmless habit, while I spent my time trying to persuade him to consider the possibility that my study could be correct and that women should be advised of this potential risk of talc,” Cramer, a paid expert and witness for the plaintiffs, said in a 2011 court filing. “I don’t think this was a question of money,” he says now. “I think it was pride of ownership. Baby Powder is a signature product for J&J.”
Baby Powder is considered a cosmetic, which doesn’t need to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration under the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
by Susan Berfield, Jef Feeley, and Margaret Cronin Fisk, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Travis Rathbone
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:
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