Jacques Majorelle (French, 1886 - 1962). Young woman under banana trees (Jeune femme sous les bananiers), N/D
via:
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Seattle’s Cat Fox on Three Decades of Repairing Guitars
At the Weiser Fiddle Festival in Idaho, a seed was planted in the imagination of Cat Fox. Some guy was repairing guitars out of a tricked out, converted sheep wagon he towed behind his truck from festival to festival. That brief visage held court in her young mind. Years later, Fox is driving around in her VW van, lost and bummed out, having recently dropped out of University of Puget Sound with a great scholarship opportunity. When it came time to mouth the inescapable question, ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ she knew a few things. She liked woodworking, she liked to hang out with musicians, and she loved to party. And here again is the guy with the sheep wagon flashing front and center in her memory. Fox was going to be a luthier.
But women don’t build guitars! At the time, few women were playing guitars, let alone making them, but Fox’s gutsy resolve had taken root.
Upon graduation from the luthier program at Minnesota Technical College in Red Wing, with completed guitar firmly in hand, she packed everything into her VW van and drove to Massachusetts. She arrived at the door of Bill Cumpiano, world-renowned luthier and author of the definitive bible of the craft, Guitar Making Tradition and Technology. Fox recalls Cumpiano’s stern and uncompromising tone on the phone as he gives her an opening, “No guarantee I will take you on but I will observe your work.” Fox thinks to herself, “Of course he’ll take me on!” He does, of course, take her on as his apprentice for two years followed by another four years as his repair technician. To this day, the best compliment she ever received was from Cumpiano, “If you decide to build guitars, I hope you go far, far away.” So she did…all the way to Seattle.
The jerky cadence of raindrops can be heard on the corrugated metal roof of Fox’s Fremont studio, Sound Guitar Repair, in a space she shares with guitar builder and husband Rick Davis. Fox works in a studio within a studio, a cozy oasis among band saws and jigs of all sizes and dimensions. Fox has never had to advertise to fill her busy schedule. Her clients range from the rich and famous to the parlor picker to the street musician. Word of mouth is all she has needs to stay busy.
Her clients include musicians the likes of Bill Frisell and Danny O’Keefe, but her favorite story is when the Everly Brothers came knocking at her door. Out of the blue she gets a call from a guy saying he’s with the Everly Brothers and can she fix one of their guitars? Apparently a roadie had tripped and badly damaged one of their iconic black Steinegger signature Ike Everly guitars. Incredulous…and convinced her friend Doug was up to his old tricks, her eyes widened when a big truck with the words “Everly Brothers” on the side rolled up to her shop. She repaired two big splits from the block and the next day, when asked about the bill, she sheepishly said,“$500.00? Is that too much?” to which the stagehand replied, “Honey, this is the Everly Brothers”.
How does a woman gain the type of respect that Cat Fox has earned in a profession which counts women luthiers in America on one hand? “I care very deeply,” are her precise words. That, and her unflagging “I can do that!” attitude. Fox sees women inherently well suited to the work of building and repairing guitars. Precise work, attention to detail, and the ability to listen and interpret what your client needs even if its not what they’re saying – these are all skills that come naturally to women.
But women don’t build guitars! At the time, few women were playing guitars, let alone making them, but Fox’s gutsy resolve had taken root.Upon graduation from the luthier program at Minnesota Technical College in Red Wing, with completed guitar firmly in hand, she packed everything into her VW van and drove to Massachusetts. She arrived at the door of Bill Cumpiano, world-renowned luthier and author of the definitive bible of the craft, Guitar Making Tradition and Technology. Fox recalls Cumpiano’s stern and uncompromising tone on the phone as he gives her an opening, “No guarantee I will take you on but I will observe your work.” Fox thinks to herself, “Of course he’ll take me on!” He does, of course, take her on as his apprentice for two years followed by another four years as his repair technician. To this day, the best compliment she ever received was from Cumpiano, “If you decide to build guitars, I hope you go far, far away.” So she did…all the way to Seattle.
The jerky cadence of raindrops can be heard on the corrugated metal roof of Fox’s Fremont studio, Sound Guitar Repair, in a space she shares with guitar builder and husband Rick Davis. Fox works in a studio within a studio, a cozy oasis among band saws and jigs of all sizes and dimensions. Fox has never had to advertise to fill her busy schedule. Her clients range from the rich and famous to the parlor picker to the street musician. Word of mouth is all she has needs to stay busy.
Her clients include musicians the likes of Bill Frisell and Danny O’Keefe, but her favorite story is when the Everly Brothers came knocking at her door. Out of the blue she gets a call from a guy saying he’s with the Everly Brothers and can she fix one of their guitars? Apparently a roadie had tripped and badly damaged one of their iconic black Steinegger signature Ike Everly guitars. Incredulous…and convinced her friend Doug was up to his old tricks, her eyes widened when a big truck with the words “Everly Brothers” on the side rolled up to her shop. She repaired two big splits from the block and the next day, when asked about the bill, she sheepishly said,“$500.00? Is that too much?” to which the stagehand replied, “Honey, this is the Everly Brothers”.
How does a woman gain the type of respect that Cat Fox has earned in a profession which counts women luthiers in America on one hand? “I care very deeply,” are her precise words. That, and her unflagging “I can do that!” attitude. Fox sees women inherently well suited to the work of building and repairing guitars. Precise work, attention to detail, and the ability to listen and interpret what your client needs even if its not what they’re saying – these are all skills that come naturally to women.
by Sarah Gardner, Fretboard Journal | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Death of a Study
In the spring of 2009, researchers started showing up in the neighborhoods of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, clipboards in hand, to enroll expecting mothers and their unborn children in a huge environmental and health study that was going to last for decades. They asked probing questions whenever a woman answered the doorbell: Was she between the ages of 18 to 49? Was she pregnant, and if yes, how far along? If she wasn’t, could the researchers stay in touch with her until she knew she was having a baby?
The National Children’s Study (NCS), as it was called, had set out to enroll and follow 100,000 children from conception until the age of 21 in an effort to unlock some of our most enduring medical mysteries — from the prevalence of asthma and attention-deficit disorder to the rise of autism. Montgomery County, a bedroom community northwest of Philadelphia, was one of its test sites, and the women targeted for recruitment came from painstakingly selected households. They would answer dozens of questions about their own health, family medical histories, jobs, and personal habits. They would provide clippings of their hair and fingernails, and dust from their houses. When they went into labor, hospital staff would be on hand to sample cord blood, placenta, the infant’s first bowel movement, and other biological specimens — each a window into the prenatal chemical milieu.
Scientists, of course, knew that developing babies and young children are exquisitely sensitive to their environments. They just needed more data, more evidence, to connect early exposures to diseases and disorders later in life — and that’s precisely what the NCS, administered under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health, was going to provide: an unprecedented epidemiological portrait of the typical American home.
“We were tapping into a data goldmine,” said Jennifer Culhane, an epidemiologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was directing the study’s local efforts. “There was a sense that we were engaging in something special, and doing more to advance the science of pediatric disease than anyone else in the world.”
Those aspirations came to naught when the NCS was canceled in December 2014, after a 14-year history during which it burned through $1.3 billion in taxpayer dollars without generating much in the way of useful information. The study’s collapse barely registered with the national media, and unlike other major taxpayer-funded failures that have become political bludgeons on Capitol Hill, reaction in Washington has been muted. But the study’s collapse left a bitter legacy of anger and frustration among those who worked on the NCS for years, only to see their efforts wasted on a bungled enterprise that critics say went nowhere and accomplished nothing. Sources interviewed for this story gave a range of reasons for the study’s demise: deep scientific divisions over how it should have been carried out, partisan bickering, and even charges of deliberate dissembling over just how much such study would ultimately cost, to name just a few.
“There is no single factor that led to the failure of the NCS to achieve its goals, but rather a persistent set of challenges facing the design, management, and costs of the study,” said Francis Collins, director of the NIH, in an email message defending his decision to terminate the program.
Still, many critics say those challenges were a result of dysfunctional management, an ever-shifting set of objectives, and even lack of support at the highest levels of the National Institutes of Health.
“Too many people loaded this study with their own desires and wishes for what they wanted it to be without thinking enough about what it could actually achieve,” said Ellen Silbergeld, a former member of an NCS federal advisory committee and a professor of environmental science, epidemiology, and health policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Many of the scientists who worked on the National Children’s Study have since moved on. But virtually all of the participants interviewed suggested that the American public lost a groundbreaking opportunity to answer questions about pediatric disease. Those questions remain as vexing now as when the study was launched nearly two decades ago — and Silbergeld was among many sources interviewed who lamented all the lost time and wasted money.
“This was a scientific humiliation for the United States,” she said.
by Charles Schmidt, Undark | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The National Children’s Study (NCS), as it was called, had set out to enroll and follow 100,000 children from conception until the age of 21 in an effort to unlock some of our most enduring medical mysteries — from the prevalence of asthma and attention-deficit disorder to the rise of autism. Montgomery County, a bedroom community northwest of Philadelphia, was one of its test sites, and the women targeted for recruitment came from painstakingly selected households. They would answer dozens of questions about their own health, family medical histories, jobs, and personal habits. They would provide clippings of their hair and fingernails, and dust from their houses. When they went into labor, hospital staff would be on hand to sample cord blood, placenta, the infant’s first bowel movement, and other biological specimens — each a window into the prenatal chemical milieu.Scientists, of course, knew that developing babies and young children are exquisitely sensitive to their environments. They just needed more data, more evidence, to connect early exposures to diseases and disorders later in life — and that’s precisely what the NCS, administered under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health, was going to provide: an unprecedented epidemiological portrait of the typical American home.
“We were tapping into a data goldmine,” said Jennifer Culhane, an epidemiologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was directing the study’s local efforts. “There was a sense that we were engaging in something special, and doing more to advance the science of pediatric disease than anyone else in the world.”
Those aspirations came to naught when the NCS was canceled in December 2014, after a 14-year history during which it burned through $1.3 billion in taxpayer dollars without generating much in the way of useful information. The study’s collapse barely registered with the national media, and unlike other major taxpayer-funded failures that have become political bludgeons on Capitol Hill, reaction in Washington has been muted. But the study’s collapse left a bitter legacy of anger and frustration among those who worked on the NCS for years, only to see their efforts wasted on a bungled enterprise that critics say went nowhere and accomplished nothing. Sources interviewed for this story gave a range of reasons for the study’s demise: deep scientific divisions over how it should have been carried out, partisan bickering, and even charges of deliberate dissembling over just how much such study would ultimately cost, to name just a few.
“There is no single factor that led to the failure of the NCS to achieve its goals, but rather a persistent set of challenges facing the design, management, and costs of the study,” said Francis Collins, director of the NIH, in an email message defending his decision to terminate the program.
Still, many critics say those challenges were a result of dysfunctional management, an ever-shifting set of objectives, and even lack of support at the highest levels of the National Institutes of Health.
“Too many people loaded this study with their own desires and wishes for what they wanted it to be without thinking enough about what it could actually achieve,” said Ellen Silbergeld, a former member of an NCS federal advisory committee and a professor of environmental science, epidemiology, and health policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Many of the scientists who worked on the National Children’s Study have since moved on. But virtually all of the participants interviewed suggested that the American public lost a groundbreaking opportunity to answer questions about pediatric disease. Those questions remain as vexing now as when the study was launched nearly two decades ago — and Silbergeld was among many sources interviewed who lamented all the lost time and wasted money.
“This was a scientific humiliation for the United States,” she said.
by Charles Schmidt, Undark | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Dutch Prototype Clean-Up Boom Brings Pacific Plastics Solution a Step Closer
A bid to clear the Pacific of its plastic debris has moved a step closer with the launch of the biggest prototype clean-up boom yet by the Dutch environment minister at a port in The Hague.
On Thursday the 100m-long barrier will be towed 20km out to sea for a year of sensor-monitored tests, before being scaled up for real-life trials off the Japanese coast at the end of next year.
If all goes well, full-scale deployment of a 100km-long version will take place in the “great Pacific garbage patch” between California and Hawaii in 2020. (...)The snake-like ocean barrier is made out of vulcanised rubber and works by harnessing sea currents to passively funnel trash in surface waters – often just millimetres in diameter – into a V-shaped cone.
A cable sub-system will anchor the structure at depths of up to 4.5km – almost twice as far down as has even been done before – keeping it in place so it can trap the rubbish for periodic collection by boats.
A fully scaled-up barrier would be the most ambitious ocean cleansing project yet, capturing around half of the plastic soup that circles the Pacific gyre within a decade. That at least is the plan.
by Arthur Nesland, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: The Ocean Cleanup
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
The Dystopian Future In Which Everyone Is The Boss
Across a number of professions, bosses have been vanishing. Last year, Tony Hsieh, CEO of the online shoe mega-retailer Zappos, announced that the company would implement Holacracy, a hierarchy-free office model with which Hsieh had become enamored after attending a conference talk by its creators. Under Holacracy—which bills itself as a system that “removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles”—Zappos employees would design their own job descriptions and work with colleagues in autonomous “circles” free from the hovering interference of “people managers.” (Former people managers were to find new roles in the company or accept buyouts.)
Hsieh hasn’t been the only boss to institute a bossless office in recent years. Somewhere between rigid corporate hierarchy and the approximately three hundred worker cooperatives that exist in the US today lies an expanding realm of manager-free workplaces. Most are white-collar and many, like Zappos, are the sorts of tech firms that have been famously predisposed to collaborative work arrangements, casual dress codes, beanbags, and other anti-corporate trappings since the beginning. But there are also industrial operations like Morning Star, the world’s largest tomato processing plant, where over 2,000 employees annually sign “Colleague Letters of Understanding” that lay out each worker’s job description and output goals, in lieu of managers to oversee production. In a 2013 overview for New York Magazine on the rise of bossless workplaces, Matthew Schaer reported that even Morning Star’s internal conflicts were resolved without hierarchy: instead of management or HR handling clashes between employees, anywhere from one to ten of the feuding parties’ colleagues would be enlisted to mediate the spat.
Does the bossless office signal progress for workers? The majority of Americans still answer to supervisors, and there are scant few who haven’t grumbled—if not seethed—over incompetent, abusive, or overly controlling managers. A number of studies have unsurprisingly confirmed that bad bosses create undue amounts of stress for workers. Thus, it stands to reason that removing such meddlesome disciplinarians, as companies like Zappos and Morning Star have done, has the potential to improve worker morale vastly. “It’s a beautiful way of structuring a workplace,” Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen told Inc. magazine last year. “Management is not nearly as necessary as it thinks it is.”
Growing evidence suggests that the disappearance of management bureaucracy also makes offices more productive. In an interview with Current, Martha Little, a senior producer at Audible, praised the company’s collaborative work structure and explained that top-down management was quickly becoming an obsolete way of organizing workplaces. “In this very fast-paced, very tech-oriented media-delivery-service world, I don’t think the hierarchies can really keep up with the fast pace of change, flexibility and input of ideas that you need to compete,” she said. In the Wall Street Journal, Tim Clem, an employee at the tech outfit GitHub [ed. no relation], similarly noted of his company’s bossless setup, “It makes you want to do more.”
But if employees at bossless offices often report good spirits and high productivity, outside of true worker cooperatives there is a hard limit to the workplace democracy, and it usually takes the form of the company’s purse strings. As Schaer noted of Morning Star, “The company is privately held, and no employee, no matter how hard-performing, is entitled to a share of the profits.” And different pay grades exist at all of the aforementioned “flattened” companies, no matter whose or how many voices are “heard” at company meetings.
Not only does the bossless office camouflage longstanding monetary inequalities, it also outsources the tasks once assigned to managers to an increasing number of workers. Employees at bossless companies who have supposedly been liberated from their manager overlords are generally compelled to absorb the duties of the now-nonexistent management in addition to whatever roles they might otherwise perform. At the software company Menlo Innovations—which prides itself on its boss-free, non-hierarchical work environment—committees of employees must reach consensus on most HR matters including hiring, firing, and determining employees’ pay. The absence of management, in other words, tends merely to displace “traditional” boss responsibilities onto a new group of people rather than eliminate them entirely.
Media theorist Alexander Galloway has challenged the assumption that horizontal arrangements are inherently egalitarian. According to Galloway, over the last few decades, labor and culture alike have been increasingly organized as networks—evident in the rise of “flexible” workplaces and cultural phenomena like the rise of social media. While plenty of academics and activists alike continue to believe that the dissolution of official hierarchy (the boss, the state) is synonymous with the dissolution of power, Galloway argues that such processes may only reflect the changing nature of a post-Fordist world. He further cautions, “Centralized verticality is only one form of organization. The distributed network is simply a different form of organization, one with its own special brand of management and control.”
Hsieh hasn’t been the only boss to institute a bossless office in recent years. Somewhere between rigid corporate hierarchy and the approximately three hundred worker cooperatives that exist in the US today lies an expanding realm of manager-free workplaces. Most are white-collar and many, like Zappos, are the sorts of tech firms that have been famously predisposed to collaborative work arrangements, casual dress codes, beanbags, and other anti-corporate trappings since the beginning. But there are also industrial operations like Morning Star, the world’s largest tomato processing plant, where over 2,000 employees annually sign “Colleague Letters of Understanding” that lay out each worker’s job description and output goals, in lieu of managers to oversee production. In a 2013 overview for New York Magazine on the rise of bossless workplaces, Matthew Schaer reported that even Morning Star’s internal conflicts were resolved without hierarchy: instead of management or HR handling clashes between employees, anywhere from one to ten of the feuding parties’ colleagues would be enlisted to mediate the spat.Does the bossless office signal progress for workers? The majority of Americans still answer to supervisors, and there are scant few who haven’t grumbled—if not seethed—over incompetent, abusive, or overly controlling managers. A number of studies have unsurprisingly confirmed that bad bosses create undue amounts of stress for workers. Thus, it stands to reason that removing such meddlesome disciplinarians, as companies like Zappos and Morning Star have done, has the potential to improve worker morale vastly. “It’s a beautiful way of structuring a workplace,” Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen told Inc. magazine last year. “Management is not nearly as necessary as it thinks it is.”
Growing evidence suggests that the disappearance of management bureaucracy also makes offices more productive. In an interview with Current, Martha Little, a senior producer at Audible, praised the company’s collaborative work structure and explained that top-down management was quickly becoming an obsolete way of organizing workplaces. “In this very fast-paced, very tech-oriented media-delivery-service world, I don’t think the hierarchies can really keep up with the fast pace of change, flexibility and input of ideas that you need to compete,” she said. In the Wall Street Journal, Tim Clem, an employee at the tech outfit GitHub [ed. no relation], similarly noted of his company’s bossless setup, “It makes you want to do more.”
But if employees at bossless offices often report good spirits and high productivity, outside of true worker cooperatives there is a hard limit to the workplace democracy, and it usually takes the form of the company’s purse strings. As Schaer noted of Morning Star, “The company is privately held, and no employee, no matter how hard-performing, is entitled to a share of the profits.” And different pay grades exist at all of the aforementioned “flattened” companies, no matter whose or how many voices are “heard” at company meetings.
Not only does the bossless office camouflage longstanding monetary inequalities, it also outsources the tasks once assigned to managers to an increasing number of workers. Employees at bossless companies who have supposedly been liberated from their manager overlords are generally compelled to absorb the duties of the now-nonexistent management in addition to whatever roles they might otherwise perform. At the software company Menlo Innovations—which prides itself on its boss-free, non-hierarchical work environment—committees of employees must reach consensus on most HR matters including hiring, firing, and determining employees’ pay. The absence of management, in other words, tends merely to displace “traditional” boss responsibilities onto a new group of people rather than eliminate them entirely.
Media theorist Alexander Galloway has challenged the assumption that horizontal arrangements are inherently egalitarian. According to Galloway, over the last few decades, labor and culture alike have been increasingly organized as networks—evident in the rise of “flexible” workplaces and cultural phenomena like the rise of social media. While plenty of academics and activists alike continue to believe that the dissolution of official hierarchy (the boss, the state) is synonymous with the dissolution of power, Galloway argues that such processes may only reflect the changing nature of a post-Fordist world. He further cautions, “Centralized verticality is only one form of organization. The distributed network is simply a different form of organization, one with its own special brand of management and control.”
by J.C. Pan, Literary Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Secret of Taste: Why We Like What We Like
If you had asked me, when I was 10, to forecast my life as an adult, I would probably have sketched out something like this: I would be driving a Trans Am, a Corvette, or some other muscle car. My house would boast a mammoth collection of pinball machines. I would sip sophisticated drinks (like Baileys Irish Cream), read Robert Ludlum novels, and blast Van Halen while sitting in an easy chair wearing sunglasses. Now that I am at a point to actually be able to realise every one of these feverishly envisioned tastes, they hold zero interest (well, perhaps the pinball machines in a weak moment).
It was not just that my 10-year-old self could not predict whom I would become but that I was incapable of imagining that my tastes could undergo such wholesale change. How could I know what I would want if I did not know who I would be?
One problem is that we do not anticipate the effect of experiencing things. We may instinctively realise we will tire of our favourite food if we eat too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we could like something if only we ate it more often. Another issue is psychological “salience”, or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers cashback, the offer is claiming our attention; it might even have influenced the purchase. By the time we get home, the salience fades; the cashback goes unclaimed. When I was 10, what mattered in a car to me was that it be “cool” and fast. What did not matter to me were monthly payments, side-impact crash protection, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the appearance of being in a midlife crisis.
Even when we look back and see how much our tastes have changed, the idea that we will change equally in the future seems to confound us. It is what keeps tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have identified the illusion that for many, the present is a “watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives”.
In one experiment, they found that people were willing to pay more money to see their favourite band perform 10 years from now than they were willing to pay to see their favourite band from 10 years ago play now. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old photo album, when you see an earlier picture of yourself and exclaim, “Oh my God, that hair!” Or “Those corduroys!” Just as pictures of ourselves can look jarring because we do not normally see ourselves as others see us, our previous tastes, viewed from “outside”, from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. Your hairstyle per se was probably not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary taste. We say, with condescension, “I can’t believe people actually dressed like that,” without realising we ourselves are currently wearing what will be considered bad taste in the future.
One of the reasons we cannot predict our future preferences is one of the things that makes those very preferences change: novelty. In the science of taste and preferences, novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one hand, we crave novelty, which defines a field such as fashion (“a field of ugliness so absolutely unbearable,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “that we have to alter it every six months”). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the women’s designer floor of the flagship store: “The first thing the customer asks when they come into the store is, ‘What’s new?’ They don’t want to know what was; they want to know what is.” How strong is this impulse? “We will sell 60% of what we’re going to sell the first four weeks the goods are on the floor.”
But we also adore familiarity. There are many who believe we like what we are used to. And yet if this were strictly true, nothing would ever change. There would be no new art styles, no new musical genres, no new products. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism’s role was in teaching people to want (and buy) new things. Producers drive economic change, he wrote, and consumers “are taught to want new things, or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using”.
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” as Steve Jobs put it. And even then, they still might not want it. Apple’s ill-fated Newton PDA device, as quaint as it now looks in this age of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably too new at the time of its release, anticipating needs and behaviours that were not yet fully realised. As Wired described it, it was “a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language”.
So, novelty or familiarity? As is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway point of some optimal U-shaped curve plotting the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he termed the “MAYA stage”, for “most advanced, yet acceptable”. This was the moment in a product design cycle when, Loewy argued, “resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in”. We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.
Anticipating how much our tastes will change is hard because we cannot see past our inherent resistance to the unfamiliar. Or how much we will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty can be. When you had your first sip of beer (or whisky), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, “Where has this been all my life?” It was, “People like this?”
We come to like beer, but it is arguably wrong to call beer an “acquired taste”, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. “If beer went on tasting to me the way the first sip tasted,” he writes, “I would never have gone on drinking beer.” Part of the problem is that alcohol is a shock to the system: it tastes like nothing that has come before, or at least nothing pleasant. New music or art can have the same effect.
It was not just that my 10-year-old self could not predict whom I would become but that I was incapable of imagining that my tastes could undergo such wholesale change. How could I know what I would want if I did not know who I would be?
One problem is that we do not anticipate the effect of experiencing things. We may instinctively realise we will tire of our favourite food if we eat too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we could like something if only we ate it more often. Another issue is psychological “salience”, or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers cashback, the offer is claiming our attention; it might even have influenced the purchase. By the time we get home, the salience fades; the cashback goes unclaimed. When I was 10, what mattered in a car to me was that it be “cool” and fast. What did not matter to me were monthly payments, side-impact crash protection, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the appearance of being in a midlife crisis.Even when we look back and see how much our tastes have changed, the idea that we will change equally in the future seems to confound us. It is what keeps tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have identified the illusion that for many, the present is a “watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives”.
In one experiment, they found that people were willing to pay more money to see their favourite band perform 10 years from now than they were willing to pay to see their favourite band from 10 years ago play now. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old photo album, when you see an earlier picture of yourself and exclaim, “Oh my God, that hair!” Or “Those corduroys!” Just as pictures of ourselves can look jarring because we do not normally see ourselves as others see us, our previous tastes, viewed from “outside”, from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. Your hairstyle per se was probably not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary taste. We say, with condescension, “I can’t believe people actually dressed like that,” without realising we ourselves are currently wearing what will be considered bad taste in the future.
One of the reasons we cannot predict our future preferences is one of the things that makes those very preferences change: novelty. In the science of taste and preferences, novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one hand, we crave novelty, which defines a field such as fashion (“a field of ugliness so absolutely unbearable,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “that we have to alter it every six months”). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the women’s designer floor of the flagship store: “The first thing the customer asks when they come into the store is, ‘What’s new?’ They don’t want to know what was; they want to know what is.” How strong is this impulse? “We will sell 60% of what we’re going to sell the first four weeks the goods are on the floor.”
But we also adore familiarity. There are many who believe we like what we are used to. And yet if this were strictly true, nothing would ever change. There would be no new art styles, no new musical genres, no new products. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism’s role was in teaching people to want (and buy) new things. Producers drive economic change, he wrote, and consumers “are taught to want new things, or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using”.
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” as Steve Jobs put it. And even then, they still might not want it. Apple’s ill-fated Newton PDA device, as quaint as it now looks in this age of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably too new at the time of its release, anticipating needs and behaviours that were not yet fully realised. As Wired described it, it was “a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language”.
So, novelty or familiarity? As is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway point of some optimal U-shaped curve plotting the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he termed the “MAYA stage”, for “most advanced, yet acceptable”. This was the moment in a product design cycle when, Loewy argued, “resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in”. We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.
Anticipating how much our tastes will change is hard because we cannot see past our inherent resistance to the unfamiliar. Or how much we will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty can be. When you had your first sip of beer (or whisky), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, “Where has this been all my life?” It was, “People like this?”
We come to like beer, but it is arguably wrong to call beer an “acquired taste”, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. “If beer went on tasting to me the way the first sip tasted,” he writes, “I would never have gone on drinking beer.” Part of the problem is that alcohol is a shock to the system: it tastes like nothing that has come before, or at least nothing pleasant. New music or art can have the same effect.
by Tom Vanderbilt, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Aart-Jan Venema
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
The Second Amendment Doesn’t Give You the Right to Own a Gun
Can we please stop pretending that the Second Amendment contains an unfettered right for everyone to buy a gun? It doesn’t, and it never has. The claims made by the small number of extremists, before and after the Orlando, Fla., massacre, are based on a deliberate lie.
The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution doesn’t just say Congress shall not infringe the right to “keep and bear arms.” It specifically says that right exists in order to maintain “a well-regulated militia.” Even the late conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia admitted those words weren’t in there by accident. Oh, and the Constitution doesn’t just say a “militia.” It says a “well-regulated” militia.
What did the Founding Fathers mean by that? We don’t have to guess because they told us. In Federalist No. 29 of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton explained at great length precisely what a “well-regulated militia” was, why the Founding Fathers thought we needed one, and why they wanted to protect it from being disarmed by the federal government.
And there’s a reason absolutely no gun extremist will ever direct you to that 1788 essay because it blows their baloney into a million pieces.
A “well-regulated militia” didn’t mean guys who read Soldier of Fortune magazine running around in the woods with AK-47s and warpaint on their faces. It basically meant what today we call the National Guard.
It should be a properly constituted, ordered and drilled (“well-regulated”) military force, organized state by state, explained Hamilton. Each state militia should be a “select corps,” “well-trained” and able to perform all the “operations of an army.” The militia needed “uniformity in … organization and discipline,” wrote Hamilton, so that it could operate like a proper army “in camp and field,” and so that it could gain the “essential … degree of proficiency in military functions.” And although it was organized state by state, it needed to be under the explicit control of the national government. The “well-regulated militia” was under the command of the president. It was “the military arm” of the government.
The one big difference between this militia and a professional army? It shouldn’t be made up of full-time professional soldiers, said the Founding Fathers. Such soldiers could be used against the people as King George had used his mercenary Redcoats. Instead, the American republic should make up its military force from part-time volunteers drawn from regular citizens. Such men would be less likely to turn on the population.
And the creation of this “well-regulated militia,” aka the National Guard, would help safeguard the freedom of the new republic because it would make the creation of a professional, mercenary army “unnecessary,” wrote Hamilton. “This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it,” he wrote.
That was the point. And that was why they wanted to make sure it couldn’t be disarmed by the federal government: So a future “tyrant” couldn’t disarm the National Guard, and then use a mercenary army to impose martial law.
The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution doesn’t just say Congress shall not infringe the right to “keep and bear arms.” It specifically says that right exists in order to maintain “a well-regulated militia.” Even the late conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia admitted those words weren’t in there by accident. Oh, and the Constitution doesn’t just say a “militia.” It says a “well-regulated” militia.
What did the Founding Fathers mean by that? We don’t have to guess because they told us. In Federalist No. 29 of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton explained at great length precisely what a “well-regulated militia” was, why the Founding Fathers thought we needed one, and why they wanted to protect it from being disarmed by the federal government.And there’s a reason absolutely no gun extremist will ever direct you to that 1788 essay because it blows their baloney into a million pieces.
A “well-regulated militia” didn’t mean guys who read Soldier of Fortune magazine running around in the woods with AK-47s and warpaint on their faces. It basically meant what today we call the National Guard.
It should be a properly constituted, ordered and drilled (“well-regulated”) military force, organized state by state, explained Hamilton. Each state militia should be a “select corps,” “well-trained” and able to perform all the “operations of an army.” The militia needed “uniformity in … organization and discipline,” wrote Hamilton, so that it could operate like a proper army “in camp and field,” and so that it could gain the “essential … degree of proficiency in military functions.” And although it was organized state by state, it needed to be under the explicit control of the national government. The “well-regulated militia” was under the command of the president. It was “the military arm” of the government.
The one big difference between this militia and a professional army? It shouldn’t be made up of full-time professional soldiers, said the Founding Fathers. Such soldiers could be used against the people as King George had used his mercenary Redcoats. Instead, the American republic should make up its military force from part-time volunteers drawn from regular citizens. Such men would be less likely to turn on the population.
And the creation of this “well-regulated militia,” aka the National Guard, would help safeguard the freedom of the new republic because it would make the creation of a professional, mercenary army “unnecessary,” wrote Hamilton. “This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it,” he wrote.
That was the point. And that was why they wanted to make sure it couldn’t be disarmed by the federal government: So a future “tyrant” couldn’t disarm the National Guard, and then use a mercenary army to impose martial law.
by Brett Arends, Marketwatch | Read more:
Image: Alexander Hamilton, uncredited
Monday, June 20, 2016
The Art of Disclosure: Fashion’s Influence Economy and the FTC
This September, lifestyle guru Aimee Song’s first book, "Capture Your Style: Transform Your Instagram Images, Showcase Your Life and Build the Ultimate Platform," will hit retailers. And if the size of her 3.6 million-strong Instagram following is any indication, it’s sure to be a commercial success. A mere mention in one of Song’s Instagram posts is powerful marketing, attracting tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. It’s little wonder, then, that companies from Laura Mercier to Dior have paid her to market their brands and products to her followers.
Song is something of a poster child for fashion’s lucrative influencer economy from which top digital stars generate hundreds of thousands — and, in some cases, millions — of dollars each year in income, not to mention perks like free product, travel and meals. Indeed, Song’s business is so good — she is thought to earn into the six figures for long-term projects — that she has written an instructional manual about how to achieve her level of success.
For some fashion influencers, amassing a following on social media is simply a hobby, or no more than an exercise in personal brand building. But as fashion businesses move their marketing dollars online and the number of native advertising deals grows, it’s becoming more difficult to discern between organic commentary and paid sponsorship.
Are consumers being deceived?
In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission — an independent agency of the US government tasked with consumer protection — issued a list of guidelines regarding “dot com” disclosures for sponsored content. The guidelines were updated in 2013 and once again in 2015 to account for newer forms of social media.
The rules unequivocally require that paid marketing posts are disclosed as such, but do not stipulate specific language. “There is some vagueness,” says Susan Scafidi, professor of fashion law at Fordham Law School and founder of the Fashion Law Institute. “There are some questions in the guidelines as to whether a simple ‘#ad’ is enough.”
The guidelines do clearly delineate when and where disclosures should take place, however. “Required disclosures must be clear and conspicuous. In evaluating whether a disclosure is likely to be clear and conspicuous, advertisers should consider its placement in the ad and its proximity to the relevant claim. The closer the disclosure is to the claim to which it relates, the better,” says the latest version of the FTC rules, which continue: “Additional considerations include: the prominence of the disclosure; whether it is unavoidable; whether other parts of the ad distract attention from the disclosure; whether the disclosure needs to be repeated at different places on a website; whether disclosures in audio messages are presented in an adequate volume and cadence; whether visual disclosures appear for a sufficient duration; and whether the language of the disclosure is understandable to the intended audience.”
Are influencers complying?
A series of recent articles examining these issues, written by Julie Zerbo, a consultant and editor-in-chief of Thefashionlaw.com, has raised the question once again. In her pieces, Zerbo has taken independent influencers (including Song), websites and traditional editors and publishers to task for failing to properly disclose when they’ve received compensation from a brand in exchange for favourable coverage. But the issue may be less black-and-white than Zerbo suggests.
To be sure, the question is particularly pertinent at the moment. Although the FTC has yet to target influencers themselves, instead going after the brands that pay for undisclosed influencer marketing, the agency has recently shifted its enforcement tactics from simply shaming offending brands to charging them with violations. In the past, companies like Ann Taylor and Cole Haan were publicly taken to task for running influencer campaigns that didn’t follow the FTC guidelines. However, no legal action was taken against these companies. That changed in the past year when American department store Lord & Taylor was formally accused by the FTC of violating its guidelines. The wrongdoing: 50 influencers were paid between $1,000 and $4,000 to post Instagram photos to wear a specific paisley dress sold at the retailer, but many failed to disclose that they were paid, or that they were given the dress for free.
Song is something of a poster child for fashion’s lucrative influencer economy from which top digital stars generate hundreds of thousands — and, in some cases, millions — of dollars each year in income, not to mention perks like free product, travel and meals. Indeed, Song’s business is so good — she is thought to earn into the six figures for long-term projects — that she has written an instructional manual about how to achieve her level of success.For some fashion influencers, amassing a following on social media is simply a hobby, or no more than an exercise in personal brand building. But as fashion businesses move their marketing dollars online and the number of native advertising deals grows, it’s becoming more difficult to discern between organic commentary and paid sponsorship.
Are consumers being deceived?
In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission — an independent agency of the US government tasked with consumer protection — issued a list of guidelines regarding “dot com” disclosures for sponsored content. The guidelines were updated in 2013 and once again in 2015 to account for newer forms of social media.
The rules unequivocally require that paid marketing posts are disclosed as such, but do not stipulate specific language. “There is some vagueness,” says Susan Scafidi, professor of fashion law at Fordham Law School and founder of the Fashion Law Institute. “There are some questions in the guidelines as to whether a simple ‘#ad’ is enough.”
The guidelines do clearly delineate when and where disclosures should take place, however. “Required disclosures must be clear and conspicuous. In evaluating whether a disclosure is likely to be clear and conspicuous, advertisers should consider its placement in the ad and its proximity to the relevant claim. The closer the disclosure is to the claim to which it relates, the better,” says the latest version of the FTC rules, which continue: “Additional considerations include: the prominence of the disclosure; whether it is unavoidable; whether other parts of the ad distract attention from the disclosure; whether the disclosure needs to be repeated at different places on a website; whether disclosures in audio messages are presented in an adequate volume and cadence; whether visual disclosures appear for a sufficient duration; and whether the language of the disclosure is understandable to the intended audience.”
Are influencers complying?
A series of recent articles examining these issues, written by Julie Zerbo, a consultant and editor-in-chief of Thefashionlaw.com, has raised the question once again. In her pieces, Zerbo has taken independent influencers (including Song), websites and traditional editors and publishers to task for failing to properly disclose when they’ve received compensation from a brand in exchange for favourable coverage. But the issue may be less black-and-white than Zerbo suggests.
To be sure, the question is particularly pertinent at the moment. Although the FTC has yet to target influencers themselves, instead going after the brands that pay for undisclosed influencer marketing, the agency has recently shifted its enforcement tactics from simply shaming offending brands to charging them with violations. In the past, companies like Ann Taylor and Cole Haan were publicly taken to task for running influencer campaigns that didn’t follow the FTC guidelines. However, no legal action was taken against these companies. That changed in the past year when American department store Lord & Taylor was formally accused by the FTC of violating its guidelines. The wrongdoing: 50 influencers were paid between $1,000 and $4,000 to post Instagram photos to wear a specific paisley dress sold at the retailer, but many failed to disclose that they were paid, or that they were given the dress for free.
by Lauren Sherman, BOF | Read more:
Image: Instagram/@lauramercier, @nicolettemason, @songofstyle, @manrepeller, @chrisellelim, @sincerelyjules
Image: Instagram/@lauramercier, @nicolettemason, @songofstyle, @manrepeller, @chrisellelim, @sincerelyjules
Why Dustin Johnson’s US Open Win Was Spoiled by the USGA’s Epic Rules Farce
[ed. Despite the controversy over The Putt, we can take comfort in Fox Sport's loving coverage of Paulina Gretzky's butt after the win.]
Let us briefly visit a land where common sense prevails. There, a significant sporting occasion would not be thrown into utter confusion in front of a worldwide audience at its key phase. There, a golf ball placed on a surface closely resembling a marble fireplace in texture may well move. There, the glaring evidence of no advantage either being sought or claimed would never result in a penalty.
Back in the real world of golf, a parallel universe sadly exists. Today we should be hailing Dustin Johnson’s major breakthrough. Arguably the most gifted American golfer of his time has finally offset years of underachievement, with the kind of victory he should have been accustomed to long ago. Instead, the shambles presided over by the United States Golf Association (USGA) for the second major of 2016 will dominate conversation. So it should, as other sports look on and laugh.
To the watching world the scene was ludicrous. To recap, a rules official informed Johnson that he would not be assessed for a penalty stroke after the ball moved when he addressed a putt on the 5th green. On the 12th tee, Johnson was told a decision would be made at the end of his round, forcing the player to complete the final six holes not knowing whether the assessment would take place or not. When the round was completed, Johnson was penalised a stroke and signed for a one-under-par 69, to win by three shots.
A sport seeking to emerge from dark age prejudice had once again taken an AK-47 to its foot, proving itself petty and unfathomable. Johnson arrived at the final holes of the biggest round of his life not knowing what his score was. Nobody watching on, including fellow competitors, knew for sure either.
It was akin to a cup final being halted with five minutes to go as officials tell the teams that the only goal of the match could, maybe, possibly be wiped out at full-time. Horse racing holds stewards enquiries, but not after the leading jockey has been informed three furlongs from home. Golf makes its return to the Olympics this summer; even the IOC would raise an eyebrow if a Johnson-esque saga were to be presided over by the USGA and its chums at the R&A. Suffice to say, it won’t be.
Let us briefly visit a land where common sense prevails. There, a significant sporting occasion would not be thrown into utter confusion in front of a worldwide audience at its key phase. There, a golf ball placed on a surface closely resembling a marble fireplace in texture may well move. There, the glaring evidence of no advantage either being sought or claimed would never result in a penalty.
Back in the real world of golf, a parallel universe sadly exists. Today we should be hailing Dustin Johnson’s major breakthrough. Arguably the most gifted American golfer of his time has finally offset years of underachievement, with the kind of victory he should have been accustomed to long ago. Instead, the shambles presided over by the United States Golf Association (USGA) for the second major of 2016 will dominate conversation. So it should, as other sports look on and laugh.To the watching world the scene was ludicrous. To recap, a rules official informed Johnson that he would not be assessed for a penalty stroke after the ball moved when he addressed a putt on the 5th green. On the 12th tee, Johnson was told a decision would be made at the end of his round, forcing the player to complete the final six holes not knowing whether the assessment would take place or not. When the round was completed, Johnson was penalised a stroke and signed for a one-under-par 69, to win by three shots.
A sport seeking to emerge from dark age prejudice had once again taken an AK-47 to its foot, proving itself petty and unfathomable. Johnson arrived at the final holes of the biggest round of his life not knowing what his score was. Nobody watching on, including fellow competitors, knew for sure either.
It was akin to a cup final being halted with five minutes to go as officials tell the teams that the only goal of the match could, maybe, possibly be wiped out at full-time. Horse racing holds stewards enquiries, but not after the leading jockey has been informed three furlongs from home. Golf makes its return to the Olympics this summer; even the IOC would raise an eyebrow if a Johnson-esque saga were to be presided over by the USGA and its chums at the R&A. Suffice to say, it won’t be.
by Ewan Murray, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen / Getty Images
Sunday, June 19, 2016
What It Is Like to Like
Art and taste in the age of the Internet.
The subject of Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” (Knopf) is taste, the term he uses for whatever it is that guides our preference for chocolate over vanilla, taupe over beige, “The Bourne Supremacy ” over “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth violin sonata over Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman’s rendering of the same work. Vanderbilt’s widely admired previous book, “Traffic,” examined a dangerous and complex activity that people pay about as much attention to while they’re doing it as they do to washing the dishes: driving a car. Making sense of driving was tough. Not nearly as tough, however, as taste.
Vanderbilt’s premise is: “We are strangers to our tastes.” He doesn’t mean that we don’t really like what we say we like. He means that we don’t know why. Our intuition that tastes are intuitive, that they are just “our tastes,” and spring from our own personal genome, has been disproved repeatedly by psychologists and market researchers. But where tastes do come from is extremely difficult to pin down. Taste is not congenital: we don’t inherit it. And it’s not consistent. We come to like things we thought we hated (or actually did hate), and we are very poor predictors of what we are likely to like in the future.
We have trouble articulating the reasons that we prefer the Schnabel to the Ashkenazy, or decide on the locally foraged fresh spring porcini mushrooms with roasted Sebastopol peaches, almonds, and crispy tempura—no, wait!, I’ll have the gâteau of Hudson Valley Moulard duck foie gras with roasted Chioggia beets, Brooks cherries, and Sicilian pistachios served with toasted brioche (thirty-dollar supplement). Just don’t ask me why.
Maybe “toasted” trumped “foraged.” Likes and dislikes can be triggered by random associations and can form in a split second. We make choices before we’ve had time to weigh the options. Vanderbilt tells us that the median amount of time spent looking at a work of art at the Met is seventeen seconds. Shopping for clothes, we say, “Oh, I love that!” before we have the first coherent idea about what it is that makes us love it.
And we are ridiculously, pathetically, embarrassingly suggestible. Cues that are barely liminal affect our preferences (which is why advertisers pay for product placement in films and TV shows). So do the choices we observe others making, the “I’ll have what she’s having” syndrome. We are also self-suggestible. “We seem to have a preference that we prefer our preference,” as Vanderbilt puts it. “There is a greater chance we will like something when we expect we are going to like it.” He calls this “a virtual law of liking.”
Vanderbilt is an intelligent writer, and there is a lot of interesting material in “You May Also Like,” but he has dived into a fathomless sea. He opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “All of life is a dispute over taste,” which pretty much sums up the problem. What does not, on some level, involve taste? Most of a day’s idle conversation is a sequence of thumbs-up, thumbs-down assertions expressed with varying degrees of sincerity and conviction. “Nice weather we’re having.” “I love your new haircut.” “This coffee is suboptimal.” “These are the best Sebastopol peaches I have ever eaten outside Sebastopol.” We don’t put a lot of thought into these judgments. They’re virtually automatic. Everything we experience gets an emoji.
And any action that entails a choice also entails a preference—what to read, what to wear, which brand of superglue to buy. Vanderbilt cites a researcher who estimates that people typically make two hundred food decisions a day. We try to find work we like, entertainment we like, people we like, shoes we like, political candidates we like. We want to sit at the best table, take the most scenic route, watch the funniest late-night talk show. Finally, there are what we think of as higher-order preferences, the astute critical appraisals we come up with when discussing the latest Don DeLillo novel or the new production of “Elektra.”
Understanding how traffic works is made exponentially more complicated by the fact that it’s not just one person who is barely paying attention; all the drivers on the road are barely paying attention, and they’re also reacting to each other. The same is true of taste. The reason stuff you don’t like is out there is that other people do like it. The continuously shifting array of “like” arrows emanating from you is reproduced billions of times across the planet and configured differently each time. Vanderbilt points out that someone who says, “I don’t want Thai food. I had some yesterday,” is forgetting that in Thailand people eat Thai food every day.
You can aggregate tastes, but only so far. Once you start lumping—once you declare that all x prefer y—you create the condition for splitting, since there will always be at least one x who is determined to stand apart from the herd. “Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other people,” Vanderbilt says. “They can change when we are trying to be like other people.” Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to the type. The outlier marks a boundary. Tastes are, by definition, things not universally shared.
The subject of Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” (Knopf) is taste, the term he uses for whatever it is that guides our preference for chocolate over vanilla, taupe over beige, “The Bourne Supremacy ” over “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth violin sonata over Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman’s rendering of the same work. Vanderbilt’s widely admired previous book, “Traffic,” examined a dangerous and complex activity that people pay about as much attention to while they’re doing it as they do to washing the dishes: driving a car. Making sense of driving was tough. Not nearly as tough, however, as taste.
Vanderbilt’s premise is: “We are strangers to our tastes.” He doesn’t mean that we don’t really like what we say we like. He means that we don’t know why. Our intuition that tastes are intuitive, that they are just “our tastes,” and spring from our own personal genome, has been disproved repeatedly by psychologists and market researchers. But where tastes do come from is extremely difficult to pin down. Taste is not congenital: we don’t inherit it. And it’s not consistent. We come to like things we thought we hated (or actually did hate), and we are very poor predictors of what we are likely to like in the future.We have trouble articulating the reasons that we prefer the Schnabel to the Ashkenazy, or decide on the locally foraged fresh spring porcini mushrooms with roasted Sebastopol peaches, almonds, and crispy tempura—no, wait!, I’ll have the gâteau of Hudson Valley Moulard duck foie gras with roasted Chioggia beets, Brooks cherries, and Sicilian pistachios served with toasted brioche (thirty-dollar supplement). Just don’t ask me why.
Maybe “toasted” trumped “foraged.” Likes and dislikes can be triggered by random associations and can form in a split second. We make choices before we’ve had time to weigh the options. Vanderbilt tells us that the median amount of time spent looking at a work of art at the Met is seventeen seconds. Shopping for clothes, we say, “Oh, I love that!” before we have the first coherent idea about what it is that makes us love it.
And we are ridiculously, pathetically, embarrassingly suggestible. Cues that are barely liminal affect our preferences (which is why advertisers pay for product placement in films and TV shows). So do the choices we observe others making, the “I’ll have what she’s having” syndrome. We are also self-suggestible. “We seem to have a preference that we prefer our preference,” as Vanderbilt puts it. “There is a greater chance we will like something when we expect we are going to like it.” He calls this “a virtual law of liking.”
Vanderbilt is an intelligent writer, and there is a lot of interesting material in “You May Also Like,” but he has dived into a fathomless sea. He opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “All of life is a dispute over taste,” which pretty much sums up the problem. What does not, on some level, involve taste? Most of a day’s idle conversation is a sequence of thumbs-up, thumbs-down assertions expressed with varying degrees of sincerity and conviction. “Nice weather we’re having.” “I love your new haircut.” “This coffee is suboptimal.” “These are the best Sebastopol peaches I have ever eaten outside Sebastopol.” We don’t put a lot of thought into these judgments. They’re virtually automatic. Everything we experience gets an emoji.
And any action that entails a choice also entails a preference—what to read, what to wear, which brand of superglue to buy. Vanderbilt cites a researcher who estimates that people typically make two hundred food decisions a day. We try to find work we like, entertainment we like, people we like, shoes we like, political candidates we like. We want to sit at the best table, take the most scenic route, watch the funniest late-night talk show. Finally, there are what we think of as higher-order preferences, the astute critical appraisals we come up with when discussing the latest Don DeLillo novel or the new production of “Elektra.”
Understanding how traffic works is made exponentially more complicated by the fact that it’s not just one person who is barely paying attention; all the drivers on the road are barely paying attention, and they’re also reacting to each other. The same is true of taste. The reason stuff you don’t like is out there is that other people do like it. The continuously shifting array of “like” arrows emanating from you is reproduced billions of times across the planet and configured differently each time. Vanderbilt points out that someone who says, “I don’t want Thai food. I had some yesterday,” is forgetting that in Thailand people eat Thai food every day.
You can aggregate tastes, but only so far. Once you start lumping—once you declare that all x prefer y—you create the condition for splitting, since there will always be at least one x who is determined to stand apart from the herd. “Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other people,” Vanderbilt says. “They can change when we are trying to be like other people.” Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to the type. The outlier marks a boundary. Tastes are, by definition, things not universally shared.
by Louis Menand, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Javier Jaen
You Can Never Hide From Your Boss
When the news broke on Monday that Microsoft had purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, most people likely read or heard about it on their way to work, checking their phones or sitting in front of a laptop with their morning coffee. It’s likely, too, that many were keeping up with emails at the same time, maybe getting a head start on a spreadsheet, or perhaps dipping into Slack or Yammer to see what coworkers were talking about. Work, of course, no longer happens only at work.
But if the acquisition itself produced a slew of jokes—most of them about how uniting the creator of Clippy and the purveyor of nagging emails might create the world’s most annoying organization—the implications of the move were bound up in exactly how and where people work today. After all, Microsoft didn’t purchase LinkedIn because it wants to get in on the job recruitment business. Rather, it wants to create the social connective tissue for the office, hoping to do to work life what Facebook did to our socializing: creating a persistent network in which to share, collaborate, perform—and, of course, to be tracked. If one consequence of Facebook was FOMO, a fear of missing out, then a “Facebook for work” may encourage something more like FONW: a fear of not working.
Large acquisitions are often disasters—witness Microsoft’s own $7.6 billion mistake in buying Nokia in 2014. But they can also augur the tech industry’s future. That same year, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion, some questioned spending so much for a free app used for chatting with friends and family. Now, because apps occupy so much of people’s attention, messaging is becoming a platform unto itself—a way to not just communicate, but also to send people money, read the news, or order a ride. Facebook saw that messaging was the next wave of mobile computing, and so swallowed up a potential competitor with hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn is a similar herald. The acquisition was made for a variety of reasons, not least because, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn tracks both employment and skills—information that can be used to analyze everything from industry-wide trends to where a company is surreptitiously moving resources. Noted tech analyst Ben Thompson called it “the most valuable data in the world.” But more generally Microsoft is in search of a “social graph” for work—a base layer of connection that not only links a worker into all of a company’s applications, but also follows that worker around wherever they go. Microsoft wants to offer its enterprise clients the solution for connecting its entire workplace for the digital era.
The imagined scenarios are admittedly intriguing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella envisions being able to call up a coworker from within an Office document in order to bring their specific skills to a project, or have LinkedIn’s news feed serve you articles related to the work you are currently doing. Meanwhile, programmer and New Republic contributing editor Paul Ford sees an array of possible changes, from replacing email with a persistent messaging service, or turning LinkedIn into an internal way to share ideas, or simply having a company directory based on skills rather than an alphabetical list of names.
In short, the primary change envisioned is that instead of LinkedIn being where you look for another job, it becomes the way to centralize activity in the job you have now, becoming your professional identity technically as much as practically.
But if the acquisition itself produced a slew of jokes—most of them about how uniting the creator of Clippy and the purveyor of nagging emails might create the world’s most annoying organization—the implications of the move were bound up in exactly how and where people work today. After all, Microsoft didn’t purchase LinkedIn because it wants to get in on the job recruitment business. Rather, it wants to create the social connective tissue for the office, hoping to do to work life what Facebook did to our socializing: creating a persistent network in which to share, collaborate, perform—and, of course, to be tracked. If one consequence of Facebook was FOMO, a fear of missing out, then a “Facebook for work” may encourage something more like FONW: a fear of not working.Large acquisitions are often disasters—witness Microsoft’s own $7.6 billion mistake in buying Nokia in 2014. But they can also augur the tech industry’s future. That same year, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion, some questioned spending so much for a free app used for chatting with friends and family. Now, because apps occupy so much of people’s attention, messaging is becoming a platform unto itself—a way to not just communicate, but also to send people money, read the news, or order a ride. Facebook saw that messaging was the next wave of mobile computing, and so swallowed up a potential competitor with hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn is a similar herald. The acquisition was made for a variety of reasons, not least because, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn tracks both employment and skills—information that can be used to analyze everything from industry-wide trends to where a company is surreptitiously moving resources. Noted tech analyst Ben Thompson called it “the most valuable data in the world.” But more generally Microsoft is in search of a “social graph” for work—a base layer of connection that not only links a worker into all of a company’s applications, but also follows that worker around wherever they go. Microsoft wants to offer its enterprise clients the solution for connecting its entire workplace for the digital era.
The imagined scenarios are admittedly intriguing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella envisions being able to call up a coworker from within an Office document in order to bring their specific skills to a project, or have LinkedIn’s news feed serve you articles related to the work you are currently doing. Meanwhile, programmer and New Republic contributing editor Paul Ford sees an array of possible changes, from replacing email with a persistent messaging service, or turning LinkedIn into an internal way to share ideas, or simply having a company directory based on skills rather than an alphabetical list of names.
In short, the primary change envisioned is that instead of LinkedIn being where you look for another job, it becomes the way to centralize activity in the job you have now, becoming your professional identity technically as much as practically.
by Navneet Alang, TNR | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Facebook is Predicting the End of the Written Word
Back when humans were first grappling with the impact of a new, global forum for communication, Clay Shirky, a prominent thinker in the digital sphere, made the persuasive argument that the internet made us more creative—even if only in a small way.
Indeed, Facebook has arguably made us all writers, since it has become the medium of choice for millions to share their views and life experiences. But in five years that creativity may look very different. Facebook is predicting the end of the written word on its platform.
In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a conference in London this morning. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech.
“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
In the room, there was a perceptible shifting—perhaps because the written word seems a rather major aspect of civilization to dispatch with so quickly. But it won’t disappear entirely, Mendelsohn assured the crowd: “You’ll have to write for the video.”
[ed. Pretty sad. I kind of like books and stuff... but, you know, progress.]
Indeed, Facebook has arguably made us all writers, since it has become the medium of choice for millions to share their views and life experiences. But in five years that creativity may look very different. Facebook is predicting the end of the written word on its platform.In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a conference in London this morning. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech.
“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
In the room, there was a perceptible shifting—perhaps because the written word seems a rather major aspect of civilization to dispatch with so quickly. But it won’t disappear entirely, Mendelsohn assured the crowd: “You’ll have to write for the video.”
by Cassie Werber, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Robert Galbraith, Reuters[ed. Pretty sad. I kind of like books and stuff... but, you know, progress.]
Wiener-palooza
[ed. Dachsunds on Parade festival, Ellensburg, WA. June, 2015.]
photos: markk
More pics after the jump. (below)
IEX Gains Approval for New Stock Exchange
America is getting a new stock exchange from the most prominent critics of high-frequency trading.
After months of delays and a brutal lobbying battle that divided Wall Street, the IEX Group won approval on Friday from the Securities and Exchange Commission to become the nation’s 13th official stock exchange.
IEX is run by the people at the center of the Michael Lewis book, “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” which profiles the early efforts of the IEX team to create a trading exchange that would be somewhat shielded from high-frequency traders.(...)
The most novel and controversial feature of the IEX exchange is a so-called speed bump that would slow down trading slightly to throw off traders that rely only on speed.
The speed bump slows trades down by only 350 microseconds — or millionths of a second — but that is an eternity in a stock exchange universe in which computers can buy and sell stocks in nanoseconds — or billionths of a second.
The Nasdaq, and other existing exchanges, have said that the IEX’s speed bump will violate rules mandating that exchanges make their prices available to all parties at the same time.
IEX’s critics have also said that the speed bump could add new complications into a stock market infrastructure that is already criticized for its complexity.
In a statement, the S.E.C. said that the commissioners “determined that a small delay will not prevent investors from accessing stock prices in a fair and efficient manner.”
The S.E.C. did say, though, that within two years it will do a study to examine whether the delays lead to problems in the markets.
If nothing else, the approval of the exchange will provide an opportunity to test the many competing theories about what impact the IEX’s speed bump will have on the pattern of trading.
The IEX has been a flash point in the broader debate over technological changes that have altered the basic functioning of the American stock markets over the last two decades. (...)
In addition to the speed bump, the IEX has said it will not offer the same fees or rebates that other exchanges do to attract traders, a common practice at other exchanges that has been criticized for distorting trading incentives. The IEX also offers fewer complicated ways to enter trades than other exchanges, in an effort to simplify trading.
Mr. Katsuyama has argued throughout the application process that IEX would provide a market-based solution to the problems created by high-frequency trading rather than requiring the S.E.C. to change the rules governing the markets.
The other exchanges have complained that the IEX was essentially asking to be exempt from rules that governed them.
After months of delays and a brutal lobbying battle that divided Wall Street, the IEX Group won approval on Friday from the Securities and Exchange Commission to become the nation’s 13th official stock exchange.
IEX is run by the people at the center of the Michael Lewis book, “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” which profiles the early efforts of the IEX team to create a trading exchange that would be somewhat shielded from high-frequency traders.(...)
The most novel and controversial feature of the IEX exchange is a so-called speed bump that would slow down trading slightly to throw off traders that rely only on speed.The speed bump slows trades down by only 350 microseconds — or millionths of a second — but that is an eternity in a stock exchange universe in which computers can buy and sell stocks in nanoseconds — or billionths of a second.
The Nasdaq, and other existing exchanges, have said that the IEX’s speed bump will violate rules mandating that exchanges make their prices available to all parties at the same time.
IEX’s critics have also said that the speed bump could add new complications into a stock market infrastructure that is already criticized for its complexity.
In a statement, the S.E.C. said that the commissioners “determined that a small delay will not prevent investors from accessing stock prices in a fair and efficient manner.”
The S.E.C. did say, though, that within two years it will do a study to examine whether the delays lead to problems in the markets.
If nothing else, the approval of the exchange will provide an opportunity to test the many competing theories about what impact the IEX’s speed bump will have on the pattern of trading.
The IEX has been a flash point in the broader debate over technological changes that have altered the basic functioning of the American stock markets over the last two decades. (...)
In addition to the speed bump, the IEX has said it will not offer the same fees or rebates that other exchanges do to attract traders, a common practice at other exchanges that has been criticized for distorting trading incentives. The IEX also offers fewer complicated ways to enter trades than other exchanges, in an effort to simplify trading.
Mr. Katsuyama has argued throughout the application process that IEX would provide a market-based solution to the problems created by high-frequency trading rather than requiring the S.E.C. to change the rules governing the markets.
The other exchanges have complained that the IEX was essentially asking to be exempt from rules that governed them.
By Nathaniel Popper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Cole Wilson
Friday, June 17, 2016
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