Tuesday, July 5, 2016
To Know a Town, Know Its Fish Market
Bobby was the first person I met in Korea. He sold flounder and baby octopus at the fish market. In Dubai, my first acquaintance was the immigrant cook who made me a breakfast of South Indian fish curry. If you want to understand daily life in an alien place — to meet the people who give a city its rhythms — go straight to the fish market.
As a food and travel writer, the first thing I do whenever I arrive in a new place is hit the fish market. In a world where entire countries have altered their streets and customs to attract moneyed tourists, fish markets — and the people who work there, hauling carcasses in the wee hours — remain relatively authentic. No other single site offers such a thorough orientation to a people, an economy, and a culture. Except for a few of the biggest (Tokyo’s Tsukiji or Seattle’s Pike Place), these aren’t marketed as tourist attractions. Yet for travelers looking to taste local delicacies — Hawaiian limpets called opihi, Seattle’s famous salmon, or baby octopus in Korea still wriggling around on the plate — seafood markets offer a no-frills place to find not only the food, but the life of a city.
Fish markets rarely compete with palaces or parks in the mind of the average tourist — you’re unlikely to frame a photograph of mollusks the way you’d frame a photo of Westminster Abbey; you’re unlikely to Instagram your fish congee for breakfast at Tekka Market in Singapore the way one might a croissant in a Paris café. Yet these markets are still visual feasts. These are the scenes that remain in my mind after travel: Stall after stall of iridescent stock in Negombo or simply laid on a tarp in Passikudah (both in Sri Lanka); silver fish stacked over sparkling ice in Seoul, South Korea; countless crabs, climbing upward, claws akimbo, in Dubai’s Deira Fish Souk.
Everywhere in the world, fish markets fill up before dawn with working-class people hustling to make a living through a fragile and expensive commodity. Fish markets are both a reflection of the values and economy of a place, and a microcosm of the city itself.
Take Noryangjin, Seoul’s largest fish market, where tuna auctions wrap by 6:30 a.m. and workers hustle to pack up the fish that’s been sold. Tables overflow with large carcasses, sorted by type, down the center of the room.
Like the rest of Seoul, Noryangjin teems with people and fast-moving hand-carts that brush by brisk walkers. I met Bobby there along a series of stalls where smaller tanks showcase live fish. Bobby overheard me speaking in English and came over to talk. This was common in Korea, to find offers of help and hospitality proffered from within the chaos of the street. The same people who jumble against you as you’re packed into the a Seoul subway car will stop everything on the street and offer directions if you so much as glance at a map.
After years living abroad — in Texas, of all places — Bobby returned to his home country of Korea, where he now ran this two-square-foot fish stall. “What kind of fish do you want?” he asked, offering to translate for other vendors if he didn’t have it. The kitchens that line Noryangjin’s outer aisles are BYOF: bring your own fish. I bought a flounder and a baby octopus, and he followed me to the restaurant behind his stall to translate my preparation requests to the chef.
Fish markets serve the best breakfasts. While I waited for my platter of sashimi, fish head-and-skeleton soup, and still-twitching raw baby octopus, I surveyed the room. A table of 20-somethings all dove from their seats to catch their friend as she swayed with drunkenness. A young couple, too, seemed to be soaking up booze. A table of men still wearing waterproof overalls from their night shift gathered over what was, for them, dinner. They seemed excited to see a visitor in the market and fed me bites of their food, including abalone — which tastes like an oyster, except more so: chewier, saltier, sweeter, and just a bit buttery. I was, possibly, the only person starting their day, rather than ending it.
by Naomi Tomky, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image:Dan Kitwood /Getty Images
As a food and travel writer, the first thing I do whenever I arrive in a new place is hit the fish market. In a world where entire countries have altered their streets and customs to attract moneyed tourists, fish markets — and the people who work there, hauling carcasses in the wee hours — remain relatively authentic. No other single site offers such a thorough orientation to a people, an economy, and a culture. Except for a few of the biggest (Tokyo’s Tsukiji or Seattle’s Pike Place), these aren’t marketed as tourist attractions. Yet for travelers looking to taste local delicacies — Hawaiian limpets called opihi, Seattle’s famous salmon, or baby octopus in Korea still wriggling around on the plate — seafood markets offer a no-frills place to find not only the food, but the life of a city.
Fish markets rarely compete with palaces or parks in the mind of the average tourist — you’re unlikely to frame a photograph of mollusks the way you’d frame a photo of Westminster Abbey; you’re unlikely to Instagram your fish congee for breakfast at Tekka Market in Singapore the way one might a croissant in a Paris café. Yet these markets are still visual feasts. These are the scenes that remain in my mind after travel: Stall after stall of iridescent stock in Negombo or simply laid on a tarp in Passikudah (both in Sri Lanka); silver fish stacked over sparkling ice in Seoul, South Korea; countless crabs, climbing upward, claws akimbo, in Dubai’s Deira Fish Souk.Everywhere in the world, fish markets fill up before dawn with working-class people hustling to make a living through a fragile and expensive commodity. Fish markets are both a reflection of the values and economy of a place, and a microcosm of the city itself.
Take Noryangjin, Seoul’s largest fish market, where tuna auctions wrap by 6:30 a.m. and workers hustle to pack up the fish that’s been sold. Tables overflow with large carcasses, sorted by type, down the center of the room.
Like the rest of Seoul, Noryangjin teems with people and fast-moving hand-carts that brush by brisk walkers. I met Bobby there along a series of stalls where smaller tanks showcase live fish. Bobby overheard me speaking in English and came over to talk. This was common in Korea, to find offers of help and hospitality proffered from within the chaos of the street. The same people who jumble against you as you’re packed into the a Seoul subway car will stop everything on the street and offer directions if you so much as glance at a map.
After years living abroad — in Texas, of all places — Bobby returned to his home country of Korea, where he now ran this two-square-foot fish stall. “What kind of fish do you want?” he asked, offering to translate for other vendors if he didn’t have it. The kitchens that line Noryangjin’s outer aisles are BYOF: bring your own fish. I bought a flounder and a baby octopus, and he followed me to the restaurant behind his stall to translate my preparation requests to the chef.
Fish markets serve the best breakfasts. While I waited for my platter of sashimi, fish head-and-skeleton soup, and still-twitching raw baby octopus, I surveyed the room. A table of 20-somethings all dove from their seats to catch their friend as she swayed with drunkenness. A young couple, too, seemed to be soaking up booze. A table of men still wearing waterproof overalls from their night shift gathered over what was, for them, dinner. They seemed excited to see a visitor in the market and fed me bites of their food, including abalone — which tastes like an oyster, except more so: chewier, saltier, sweeter, and just a bit buttery. I was, possibly, the only person starting their day, rather than ending it.
by Naomi Tomky, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image:Dan Kitwood /Getty Images
Balmuda, the $230 Toaster From Japan
It's a plain little oven, but what comes out is both mundane and magical: perfectly toasted bread.
Balmuda, a small appliance maker based in Tokyo's suburbs, has taken an ordinary kitchen appliance—the toaster—and turned it into a high-tech gadget. Using steam and carefully calibrated heat cycles, it transforms store-bought bread into something that smells, tastes and feels like it popped out of a baker's oven.
The toaster costs 24,000 yen ($230), or almost five times the price of a regular device in Japan (the smaller appliances with doors and trays are the norm here, rather than the pop-up variety). With at least a three-month wait in stores, the gadget has become a quiet hit, even though the manufacturer hasn't bought ads or aired any commercials since it debuted in June—an unusual glimmer of innovation in a country that once wooed consumers with Walkmans, digital cameras and flat-panel TVs.
It was at a company picnic on a rainy day, warming bread on a grill, that company founder Gen Terao and his band of product designers accidentally made great toast. After the showers stopped, they tried to reproduce it in a parking lot and realized that water was the key. Thousands of slices later, they figured out that steam traps moisture inside the bread while it's being warmed at a low temperature. The heat is cranked up just at the end, giving it a respectable crust.
"The best results are with croissants," said Mark Oda, who works on web and media content in Tokyo and was among the first to buy Balmuda's toaster. "I can never go back to 5,000-yen toasters."
by Reed Stevenson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Akio Kon/Bloomber
Balmuda, a small appliance maker based in Tokyo's suburbs, has taken an ordinary kitchen appliance—the toaster—and turned it into a high-tech gadget. Using steam and carefully calibrated heat cycles, it transforms store-bought bread into something that smells, tastes and feels like it popped out of a baker's oven.
The toaster costs 24,000 yen ($230), or almost five times the price of a regular device in Japan (the smaller appliances with doors and trays are the norm here, rather than the pop-up variety). With at least a three-month wait in stores, the gadget has become a quiet hit, even though the manufacturer hasn't bought ads or aired any commercials since it debuted in June—an unusual glimmer of innovation in a country that once wooed consumers with Walkmans, digital cameras and flat-panel TVs.It was at a company picnic on a rainy day, warming bread on a grill, that company founder Gen Terao and his band of product designers accidentally made great toast. After the showers stopped, they tried to reproduce it in a parking lot and realized that water was the key. Thousands of slices later, they figured out that steam traps moisture inside the bread while it's being warmed at a low temperature. The heat is cranked up just at the end, giving it a respectable crust.
"The best results are with croissants," said Mark Oda, who works on web and media content in Tokyo and was among the first to buy Balmuda's toaster. "I can never go back to 5,000-yen toasters."
by Reed Stevenson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Akio Kon/Bloomber
Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind
A paper in The British Medical Journal in December reported that cognitive behavioral therapy — a means of coaxing people into changing the way they think — is as effective as Prozac or Zoloft in treating major depression.
In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water.
Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications.
Depression can be treated in two radically different ways: by altering the brain with chemicals, or by altering the mind by talking to a therapist. But we still can’t explain how mind arises from matter or how, in turn, mind acts on the brain.
This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly described by the philosopher David Chalmers at a recent symposium at The New York Academy of Sciences. “The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that,” he said.
Descartes’s notion of dualism — mind and body as separate things — has long receded from science. The challenge now is to explain how the inner world of consciousness arises from the flesh of the brain.
Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.
The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing.
“The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.
It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.”
The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play, “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan.”
Mr. Stoppard borrowed his title from a paper by Dr. Chalmers. The “easy problem” is explaining, at least in principle, how thinking, memory, attention and so forth are just neurological computing. But for the hard problem — why all of these processes feel like something — “there is nothing like a consensus theory or even a consensus guess,” Dr. Chalmers said at the symposium.
Or, as Hilary puts it in the play, “Every theory proposed for the problem of consciousness has the same degree of demonstrability as divine intervention.” There is a gap in the explanation where suddenly a miracle seems to occur.
In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water.
Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications.Depression can be treated in two radically different ways: by altering the brain with chemicals, or by altering the mind by talking to a therapist. But we still can’t explain how mind arises from matter or how, in turn, mind acts on the brain.
This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly described by the philosopher David Chalmers at a recent symposium at The New York Academy of Sciences. “The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that,” he said.
Descartes’s notion of dualism — mind and body as separate things — has long receded from science. The challenge now is to explain how the inner world of consciousness arises from the flesh of the brain.
Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.
The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing.
“The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.
It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.”
The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play, “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan.”
Mr. Stoppard borrowed his title from a paper by Dr. Chalmers. The “easy problem” is explaining, at least in principle, how thinking, memory, attention and so forth are just neurological computing. But for the hard problem — why all of these processes feel like something — “there is nothing like a consensus theory or even a consensus guess,” Dr. Chalmers said at the symposium.
Or, as Hilary puts it in the play, “Every theory proposed for the problem of consciousness has the same degree of demonstrability as divine intervention.” There is a gap in the explanation where suddenly a miracle seems to occur.
by George Johnson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chris Silas Neal
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Stuck Waiting at Airport Security? Blame This Company and TSA
The Transportation Security Administration would have us believe that those outrageous waits at airport checkpoints that made headlines recently were caused by a screener shortage or a surge in passengers. But there’s another reason for the crushing lines: a private contractor.
MorphoTrustUSA, in charge of scaling up the agency’s PreCheck fast-track lanes at airports around the country, is suing the federal government, a move that could prevent relief for millions of angry travelers.
Tens of thousands of travelers have missed their flights in recent months as wait times at checkpoints exceeded two hours at busy hubs in places like Chicago and Seattle. And there’s another pressing reason to fix the problem: big crowds at airports are potential targets for terrorists as recent attacks in Brussels, and now, Istanbul, have shown.
While Congress quickly gave TSA money to bring in reinforcements after lines spilled out of terminals, the fix that has the best chance of succeeding in the long run, experts say, is to get PreCheck enrollment into high gear.
MorphoTrust already has a contract with the TSA to bring millions of new members into PreCheck so they can keep their shoes on and their laptops stored as they whisk through security. But TSA believes that burden is too much for one company to handle and it’s been trying since 2013 to bring in more private sector vendors to join the effort to boost enrollments from 3 million today to 25 million by 2019, when 50 percent of all fliers would get the express treatment.
According to those familiar with the bidding process thus far, the aim is to make it as easy to sign up for PreCheck as it is to purchase a product online, while maintaining the integrity of the vetting process.
But since January, MorphoTrust has been fighting back.
First, the company filed what’s known as a “bid protest” that basically stopped TSA from issuing awards to more companies. When that protest was overruled by the TSA and the Government Accountability Office, MorphoTrust sued the government in federal claims court. While the legal process drags on, TSA is effectively blocked from issuing the new contracts and reaping the benefits this could bring.
“It is frankly bizarre,” said Robert Poole, director of transportation policy for the Reason Foundation, who has followed TSA since its inception after the 9/11 attacks. “It would be tragic for air travelers if this gets held up for another year or two.” (...)
A Delay Two Decades in the Making
The story dates back to the beginnings of TSA in 2001, when Congress mandated that the nascent agency establish a “trusted passenger” program to give low-risk travelers expedited treatment so screeners could focus their attention on fliers who might merit more scrutiny. For more than a decade TSA struggled with how to meet that goal, rolling out a series of failed schemes; they ranged from the comically ineffectual (“Black Diamond” lanes for “expert” travelers, dreamed up by a TSA chief who liked to ski) to the downright creepy, with a far-fetched plan to tap credit rating firms for personal information to establish a vast database onall passengers (who would be given “threat scores” for a good measure).
Finally, TSA in 2011 came up with PreCheck, which it believed would be less controversial since it was voluntary. The idea would be to give fliers who submitted to a background check and fingerprinting a sort of “screening lite” at airports that, like EZ Pass lanes at toll plazas, would make everything move more efficiently.
TSA didn’t have the resources to jumpstart the plan so it selected MorphoTrust to set up a network of enrollment services; after all, the company was working under contract with TSA, performing vetting services for things like a transportation worker ID program. Morpho’s role has been mainly a passive one: collecting the application forms and obtaining fingerprints, which are passed on to the TSA, so the data can be run through the FBI’s criminal background check apparatus.
TSA made its first blunder with PreCheck at inception by announcing a goal of having 25 percent of all air travelers using the speedy lanes by the end of 2013. It soon became clear that wasn’t going to happen: after an initial surge of interest, PreCheck enrollment proceeded at a desultory pace. Maybe it was the required in-person appearance at a TSA-approved center, or the $85 fee for five-year membership, but whatever the reason, sign-ups fell below expectations.
“This disastrous enrollment process is producing a chokepoint” that’s depriving millions of travelers of the benefits of PreCheck, said Kevin Mitchell, who heads the Business Travel Coalition. He added that these express security lanes produce on average three times the passenger throughput as regular security lines.
But TSA instead saw another way to reach that 25 percent goal: reel in passengers who were not part of PreCheck, but who popped up as low-risk in the routine assessments TSA gives to all passengers before flight time. (That’s under something called Secure Flight, which is why you provide your date of birth and exact legal name when you book a flight.) The number of people using the lines exploded by 300 percent.
“It was a fiasco,” Poole said, with clueless passengers clogging the lanes and slowing things down for everyone. And when an infamous 1970s terrorist, Sara Jane Olsen, was waved into a PreCheck lane by a screener (over objections from another TSA agent who recognized the former fugitive) this one too bit the dust.
MorphoTrustUSA, in charge of scaling up the agency’s PreCheck fast-track lanes at airports around the country, is suing the federal government, a move that could prevent relief for millions of angry travelers.
Tens of thousands of travelers have missed their flights in recent months as wait times at checkpoints exceeded two hours at busy hubs in places like Chicago and Seattle. And there’s another pressing reason to fix the problem: big crowds at airports are potential targets for terrorists as recent attacks in Brussels, and now, Istanbul, have shown.While Congress quickly gave TSA money to bring in reinforcements after lines spilled out of terminals, the fix that has the best chance of succeeding in the long run, experts say, is to get PreCheck enrollment into high gear.
MorphoTrust already has a contract with the TSA to bring millions of new members into PreCheck so they can keep their shoes on and their laptops stored as they whisk through security. But TSA believes that burden is too much for one company to handle and it’s been trying since 2013 to bring in more private sector vendors to join the effort to boost enrollments from 3 million today to 25 million by 2019, when 50 percent of all fliers would get the express treatment.
According to those familiar with the bidding process thus far, the aim is to make it as easy to sign up for PreCheck as it is to purchase a product online, while maintaining the integrity of the vetting process.
But since January, MorphoTrust has been fighting back.
First, the company filed what’s known as a “bid protest” that basically stopped TSA from issuing awards to more companies. When that protest was overruled by the TSA and the Government Accountability Office, MorphoTrust sued the government in federal claims court. While the legal process drags on, TSA is effectively blocked from issuing the new contracts and reaping the benefits this could bring.
“It is frankly bizarre,” said Robert Poole, director of transportation policy for the Reason Foundation, who has followed TSA since its inception after the 9/11 attacks. “It would be tragic for air travelers if this gets held up for another year or two.” (...)
A Delay Two Decades in the Making
The story dates back to the beginnings of TSA in 2001, when Congress mandated that the nascent agency establish a “trusted passenger” program to give low-risk travelers expedited treatment so screeners could focus their attention on fliers who might merit more scrutiny. For more than a decade TSA struggled with how to meet that goal, rolling out a series of failed schemes; they ranged from the comically ineffectual (“Black Diamond” lanes for “expert” travelers, dreamed up by a TSA chief who liked to ski) to the downright creepy, with a far-fetched plan to tap credit rating firms for personal information to establish a vast database onall passengers (who would be given “threat scores” for a good measure).
Finally, TSA in 2011 came up with PreCheck, which it believed would be less controversial since it was voluntary. The idea would be to give fliers who submitted to a background check and fingerprinting a sort of “screening lite” at airports that, like EZ Pass lanes at toll plazas, would make everything move more efficiently.
TSA didn’t have the resources to jumpstart the plan so it selected MorphoTrust to set up a network of enrollment services; after all, the company was working under contract with TSA, performing vetting services for things like a transportation worker ID program. Morpho’s role has been mainly a passive one: collecting the application forms and obtaining fingerprints, which are passed on to the TSA, so the data can be run through the FBI’s criminal background check apparatus.
TSA made its first blunder with PreCheck at inception by announcing a goal of having 25 percent of all air travelers using the speedy lanes by the end of 2013. It soon became clear that wasn’t going to happen: after an initial surge of interest, PreCheck enrollment proceeded at a desultory pace. Maybe it was the required in-person appearance at a TSA-approved center, or the $85 fee for five-year membership, but whatever the reason, sign-ups fell below expectations.
“This disastrous enrollment process is producing a chokepoint” that’s depriving millions of travelers of the benefits of PreCheck, said Kevin Mitchell, who heads the Business Travel Coalition. He added that these express security lanes produce on average three times the passenger throughput as regular security lines.
But TSA instead saw another way to reach that 25 percent goal: reel in passengers who were not part of PreCheck, but who popped up as low-risk in the routine assessments TSA gives to all passengers before flight time. (That’s under something called Secure Flight, which is why you provide your date of birth and exact legal name when you book a flight.) The number of people using the lines exploded by 300 percent.
“It was a fiasco,” Poole said, with clueless passengers clogging the lanes and slowing things down for everyone. And when an infamous 1970s terrorist, Sara Jane Olsen, was waved into a PreCheck lane by a screener (over objections from another TSA agent who recognized the former fugitive) this one too bit the dust.
by Barbara Peterson, Daily Beast | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Scotty Moore (December, 1931 – June, 2016)
The passing of original Elvis Presley guitarist Scotty Moore this week, despite living to the ripe old age of 84, nevertheless sent shockwaves across the rock ‘n’ roll community already still mourning the deaths of several of its heroes this year.
The loss of Moore, who continued to produce, record and perform right up until before he fell ill with symptoms not exactly revealed at press time, sent a special kind of jolt through the hearts of music fans the world over, because his guitar playing has served as one of the key building blocks of the modern rock infrastructure since that fateful day after the Fourth of July in 1954 when he cut his first session with Elvis at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips.
The King may have given rock music its swagger in the mid-’50s, but Moore gave the young genre its sense of danger with his sharp, piercing variation of the Chet Atkins style that influenced him on such priceless early Presley cuts as “That’s All Right”, “Mystery Train”, “Long Tall Sally” and that indelible walking riff on “Jailhouse Rock”.
Elvis and his swinging hips might have made millions of teenage girls swoon in the ’50s, but just as many fell in love with the pure rawness and simplicity of Moore’s guitar playing, including some of the most renowned guitar players of the last 60 years: Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, George Harrison, Ron Wood, Rick Nielsen, Mark Knopfler, Alvin Lee, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Ramone, the list goes on forever.
“All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that,” Richards once famously stated. “Everyone else wanted to be Elvis; I wanted to be Scotty.”
Listen to the reckless abandon he uses to back Presley in his second performance at the Louisiana Hayride on August 20, 1955, and you will clearly recognize what Keef and countless others heard on the outset, that unbridled purity that made Moore’s tiny little amp sound like Neil Young’s great wall of Fenders. The strings on his Gibson ES-295 were lightning in a bottle, the spark that ignited the biggest youth movement in American history.
The loss of Moore, who continued to produce, record and perform right up until before he fell ill with symptoms not exactly revealed at press time, sent a special kind of jolt through the hearts of music fans the world over, because his guitar playing has served as one of the key building blocks of the modern rock infrastructure since that fateful day after the Fourth of July in 1954 when he cut his first session with Elvis at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips.The King may have given rock music its swagger in the mid-’50s, but Moore gave the young genre its sense of danger with his sharp, piercing variation of the Chet Atkins style that influenced him on such priceless early Presley cuts as “That’s All Right”, “Mystery Train”, “Long Tall Sally” and that indelible walking riff on “Jailhouse Rock”.
Elvis and his swinging hips might have made millions of teenage girls swoon in the ’50s, but just as many fell in love with the pure rawness and simplicity of Moore’s guitar playing, including some of the most renowned guitar players of the last 60 years: Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, George Harrison, Ron Wood, Rick Nielsen, Mark Knopfler, Alvin Lee, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Ramone, the list goes on forever.
“All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that,” Richards once famously stated. “Everyone else wanted to be Elvis; I wanted to be Scotty.”
Listen to the reckless abandon he uses to back Presley in his second performance at the Louisiana Hayride on August 20, 1955, and you will clearly recognize what Keef and countless others heard on the outset, that unbridled purity that made Moore’s tiny little amp sound like Neil Young’s great wall of Fenders. The strings on his Gibson ES-295 were lightning in a bottle, the spark that ignited the biggest youth movement in American history.
by Ron Hart, Observer Culture | Read more:
Image: Scotty Moore
Friday, July 1, 2016
AI, Apple and Google
In the last couple of years, magic started happening in AI. Techniques started working, or started working much better, and new techniques have appeared, especially around machine learning ('ML'), and when those were applied to some long-standing and important use cases we started getting dramatically better results. For example, the error rates for image recognition, speech recognition and natural language processing have collapsed to close to human rates, at least on some measurements.
So you can say to your phone: 'show me pictures of my dog at the beach' and a speech recognition system turns the audio into text, natural language processing takes the text, works out that this is a photo query and hands it off to your photo app, and your photo app, which has used ML systems to tag your photos with ‘dog’ and 'beach’, runs a database query and shows you the tagged images. Magic.
There are really two things going on here - you’re using voice to fill in a dialogue box for a query, and that dialogue box can run queries that might not have been possible before. Both of these are enabled by machine learning, but they’re built quite separately, and indeed the most interesting part is not the voice but the query. In fact, the important structural change behind being able to ask for ‘Pictures with dogs at the beach’ is not that the computer can find it but that the computer has worked out, itself, how to find it. You give it a million pictures labelled ‘this has a dog in it’ and a million labelled ‘this doesn’t have a dog’ and it works out how to work out what a dog looks like. Now, try that with ‘customers in this data set who were about to churn’, or ‘this network had a security breach’, or ‘stories that people read and shared a lot’. Then try it without labels ('unsupervised' rather than 'supervised' learning).
Today you would spend hours or weeks in data analysis tools looking for the right criteria to find these, and you’d need people doing that work - sorting and resorting that Excel table and eyeballing for the weird result, metaphorically speaking, but with a million rows and a thousand columns. Machine learning offers the promise that a lot of very large and very boring analyses of data can be automated - not just running the search, but working out what the search should be to find the result you want.
That is, the eye-catching demos of speech interfaces or image recognition are just the most visible demos of the underlying techniques, but those have much broader applications - you can also apply them to a keyboard, a music recommendation system, a network security model or a self-driving car. Maybe.
This is clearly a fundamental change for Google. Narrowly, image and speech recognition mean that it will be able to understand questions better and index audio, images and video better. But more importantly, it will answer questions better, and answer questions that it could never really answer before at all. Hence, aswe saw at Google IO, the company is being recentred on these techniques. And of course, all of these techniques will be used in different ways to varying degrees for different use cases, just as AlphaGo uses a range of different techniques. The thing that gets the attention is ‘Google Assistant - a front-end using voice and analysis of your behaviour to try both to capture questions better and address some questions before they’re asked. But that's just the tip of the spear - the real change is in the quality of understanding of the corpus of data that Google has gathered, and in the kind of queries that Google will be able to answer in all sorts of different products. That's really just at the very beginning right now.
The same applies in different ways to Microsoft, which (having missed mobile entirely) is creating cloud-based tools to allow developers to build their own applications on these techniques, and for Facebook (what is the newsfeed if not a machine learning application?), and indeed for IBM. Anyone who handles lots of data for money, or helps other people do it, will change, and there will be a whole bunch of new companies created around this.
On the other hand, while we have magic we do not have HAL 9000 - we do not have a system that is close to human intelligence (so-called 'general AI'). Nor really do we have a good theory as to what that would mean - whether human intelligence is the sum of techniques and ideas we already have, but more, or whether there is something else. Rather, we have a bunch of tools that need to be built and linked together. I can ask Google or Siri to show me pictures of my dog on a beach because Google and Apple have linked together tools to do that, but I can't ask it to book me a restaurant unless they've added an API integration with Opentable. This is the fundamental challenge for Siri, Google Assistant or any chat bot (as I discussed here) - what can you ask?
This takes us to a whole class of jokes often made about what does and does not count as AI in the first place:
I think a foundational point here is Eric Raymond's rule that a computer should 'never ask the user for any information that it can autodetect, copy, or deduce' - especially, here, deduce. One way to see the whole development of computing over the past 50 years is as removing questions that a computer needed to ask, and adding new questions that it could ask. Lots of those things didn't necessarily look like questions as they're presented to the user, but they were, and computers don't ask them anymore:
This takes me to Apple.
Apple has been making computers that ask you fewer questions since 1984, and people have been complaining about that for just as long - one user's question is another user's free choice (something you can see clearly in the contrasts between iOS and Android today). Steve Jobs once said that the interface for iDVD should just have one button: ‘BURN’. It launched Data Detectors in 1997 - a framework that tried to look at text and extract structured data in a helpful way - appointments, phone numbers or addresses. Today you'd use AI techniques to get there, so was that AI? Or a 'bunch of IF statements'? Is there a canonical list of algorithm that count as AI? Does it matter? To a user who can tap on a number to dial instead of copy & pasting, is that a meaningful question?
So you can say to your phone: 'show me pictures of my dog at the beach' and a speech recognition system turns the audio into text, natural language processing takes the text, works out that this is a photo query and hands it off to your photo app, and your photo app, which has used ML systems to tag your photos with ‘dog’ and 'beach’, runs a database query and shows you the tagged images. Magic.
There are really two things going on here - you’re using voice to fill in a dialogue box for a query, and that dialogue box can run queries that might not have been possible before. Both of these are enabled by machine learning, but they’re built quite separately, and indeed the most interesting part is not the voice but the query. In fact, the important structural change behind being able to ask for ‘Pictures with dogs at the beach’ is not that the computer can find it but that the computer has worked out, itself, how to find it. You give it a million pictures labelled ‘this has a dog in it’ and a million labelled ‘this doesn’t have a dog’ and it works out how to work out what a dog looks like. Now, try that with ‘customers in this data set who were about to churn’, or ‘this network had a security breach’, or ‘stories that people read and shared a lot’. Then try it without labels ('unsupervised' rather than 'supervised' learning). Today you would spend hours or weeks in data analysis tools looking for the right criteria to find these, and you’d need people doing that work - sorting and resorting that Excel table and eyeballing for the weird result, metaphorically speaking, but with a million rows and a thousand columns. Machine learning offers the promise that a lot of very large and very boring analyses of data can be automated - not just running the search, but working out what the search should be to find the result you want.
That is, the eye-catching demos of speech interfaces or image recognition are just the most visible demos of the underlying techniques, but those have much broader applications - you can also apply them to a keyboard, a music recommendation system, a network security model or a self-driving car. Maybe.
This is clearly a fundamental change for Google. Narrowly, image and speech recognition mean that it will be able to understand questions better and index audio, images and video better. But more importantly, it will answer questions better, and answer questions that it could never really answer before at all. Hence, aswe saw at Google IO, the company is being recentred on these techniques. And of course, all of these techniques will be used in different ways to varying degrees for different use cases, just as AlphaGo uses a range of different techniques. The thing that gets the attention is ‘Google Assistant - a front-end using voice and analysis of your behaviour to try both to capture questions better and address some questions before they’re asked. But that's just the tip of the spear - the real change is in the quality of understanding of the corpus of data that Google has gathered, and in the kind of queries that Google will be able to answer in all sorts of different products. That's really just at the very beginning right now.
The same applies in different ways to Microsoft, which (having missed mobile entirely) is creating cloud-based tools to allow developers to build their own applications on these techniques, and for Facebook (what is the newsfeed if not a machine learning application?), and indeed for IBM. Anyone who handles lots of data for money, or helps other people do it, will change, and there will be a whole bunch of new companies created around this.
On the other hand, while we have magic we do not have HAL 9000 - we do not have a system that is close to human intelligence (so-called 'general AI'). Nor really do we have a good theory as to what that would mean - whether human intelligence is the sum of techniques and ideas we already have, but more, or whether there is something else. Rather, we have a bunch of tools that need to be built and linked together. I can ask Google or Siri to show me pictures of my dog on a beach because Google and Apple have linked together tools to do that, but I can't ask it to book me a restaurant unless they've added an API integration with Opentable. This is the fundamental challenge for Siri, Google Assistant or any chat bot (as I discussed here) - what can you ask?
This takes us to a whole class of jokes often made about what does and does not count as AI in the first place:
- "Is that AI or just a bunch of IF statements?"
- "Every time we figure out a piece of it [AI], it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation
- "AI is whatever isn't been done yet"
I think a foundational point here is Eric Raymond's rule that a computer should 'never ask the user for any information that it can autodetect, copy, or deduce' - especially, here, deduce. One way to see the whole development of computing over the past 50 years is as removing questions that a computer needed to ask, and adding new questions that it could ask. Lots of those things didn't necessarily look like questions as they're presented to the user, but they were, and computers don't ask them anymore:
- Where do you want to save this file?
- Do you want to defragment your hard disk?
- What interrupt should your sound card use?
- Do you want to quit this application?
- Which photos do you want to delete to save space?
- Which of these 10 search criteria do you want to fill in to run a web search?
- What's the PIN for your phone?
- What kind of memory do you want to run this program in?
- What's the right way to spell that word?
- What number is this page?
- Which of your friends' updates do you want to see?
This takes me to Apple.
Apple has been making computers that ask you fewer questions since 1984, and people have been complaining about that for just as long - one user's question is another user's free choice (something you can see clearly in the contrasts between iOS and Android today). Steve Jobs once said that the interface for iDVD should just have one button: ‘BURN’. It launched Data Detectors in 1997 - a framework that tried to look at text and extract structured data in a helpful way - appointments, phone numbers or addresses. Today you'd use AI techniques to get there, so was that AI? Or a 'bunch of IF statements'? Is there a canonical list of algorithm that count as AI? Does it matter? To a user who can tap on a number to dial instead of copy & pasting, is that a meaningful question?
by Benedict Evans | Read more:
Image: via:
Everything You Know About Surviving Rip Currents Is Wrong (Maybe)
Conventional wisdom says that Jamie MacMahan was doing everything right when, about a decade ago, he found himself caught in a rip current while swimming off the coast of Monterey, California. Rips flow seaward, out to deep water, so beach access signs across the country advise swimmers to paddle parallel to the beach to escape them. The savage, dread-inducing flows kill more beachgoers each year than any other threat and MacMahan, a professor of oceanography and a strong swimmer, was following the “swim parallel” gospel, paddling steadily. But as he thrashed in the cold Pacific, the rip refused to relent. “I thought, ‘That’s interesting,’” MacMahan says.
MacMahan, it’s important to note, had done this to himself. A rip current expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, he had volunteered to subject himself to the rip for a safety video the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization was filming. With plenty of experience, he wasn’t in serious danger. “But as I was swimming parallel to the shore, left and right, I noticed that it was easier to swim one direction more than the other,” MacMahan says. The safety guidelines he was promoting—the life-saving advice we tell the millions of Americans who flock to the beach each summer—he thought, could be wrong.
In the last five years, MacMahan’s research has upended the field of rip current studies. Since that initial experience in Monterey, he’s used GPS devices to meticulously track nearshore currents in the U.S., England, and France, and has jumped into rips around the world. Rips can form on any beach, MacMahan says, and swimmers usually don’t know a rip’s present until they’re in its clutches. Panicked victims often try to swim directly back to shore—against the powerful offshore flow. Swimmers familiar with rips might try swimming parallel to escape. But MacMahan’s research suggests doing the unthinkable: giving in and going with the flow.
Eighty to 90 percent of rips MacMahan has studied flow in huge circles, from the shallows, out through the breakers and back again, every few minutes. A swimmer stuck in a circulating rip has no way of knowing which way the current is flowing. That means that by swimming parallel to the shore—something signs at nearly every popular beach in the country advise—the swimmer has a 50/50 chance of paddling against the deadly current.
“If you can relax—and it’s a long time, for maybe three minutes—you’re generally going to float back to the beach,” MacMahan says.
It’s a radically simple finding—one that challenges our primordial instincts and everything we think we know about beach safety. The discovery, which MacMahan published in Marine Geology in 2010 and calls rip current “circulation,” is still contentious six years later. His peer-reviewed findings have dramatically changed the way Australia tells its citizens how to survive this menace. But at home, MacMahan’s work is considerably more controversial and his research has opened a gaping divide in the sleepy rip current field.
“The reaction to Jamie’s findings has polarized the community,” says Rob Brander, a prominent rip researcher. For some leaders in the field, MacMahan’s recommendation to simply float through a rip current is, at best, an idea to be ignored and dismissed; at worst, though, the advice is potentially deadly.
MacMahan, it’s important to note, had done this to himself. A rip current expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, he had volunteered to subject himself to the rip for a safety video the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization was filming. With plenty of experience, he wasn’t in serious danger. “But as I was swimming parallel to the shore, left and right, I noticed that it was easier to swim one direction more than the other,” MacMahan says. The safety guidelines he was promoting—the life-saving advice we tell the millions of Americans who flock to the beach each summer—he thought, could be wrong.In the last five years, MacMahan’s research has upended the field of rip current studies. Since that initial experience in Monterey, he’s used GPS devices to meticulously track nearshore currents in the U.S., England, and France, and has jumped into rips around the world. Rips can form on any beach, MacMahan says, and swimmers usually don’t know a rip’s present until they’re in its clutches. Panicked victims often try to swim directly back to shore—against the powerful offshore flow. Swimmers familiar with rips might try swimming parallel to escape. But MacMahan’s research suggests doing the unthinkable: giving in and going with the flow.
Eighty to 90 percent of rips MacMahan has studied flow in huge circles, from the shallows, out through the breakers and back again, every few minutes. A swimmer stuck in a circulating rip has no way of knowing which way the current is flowing. That means that by swimming parallel to the shore—something signs at nearly every popular beach in the country advise—the swimmer has a 50/50 chance of paddling against the deadly current.
“If you can relax—and it’s a long time, for maybe three minutes—you’re generally going to float back to the beach,” MacMahan says.
It’s a radically simple finding—one that challenges our primordial instincts and everything we think we know about beach safety. The discovery, which MacMahan published in Marine Geology in 2010 and calls rip current “circulation,” is still contentious six years later. His peer-reviewed findings have dramatically changed the way Australia tells its citizens how to survive this menace. But at home, MacMahan’s work is considerably more controversial and his research has opened a gaping divide in the sleepy rip current field.
“The reaction to Jamie’s findings has polarized the community,” says Rob Brander, a prominent rip researcher. For some leaders in the field, MacMahan’s recommendation to simply float through a rip current is, at best, an idea to be ignored and dismissed; at worst, though, the advice is potentially deadly.
by David Ferry, Outside | Read more:
Image: Todd Quackenbush/Unsplash
Teen Created a Robot Lawyer App That Just Overturned 160,000 Parking Tickets
[ed. I can't vouch for this or its creator's true intentions (see below), but anything that's basically altruistic in our get rich quick, profit-driven world should get some kind of recognition.]
Got a bullshit parking ticket? Now you can appeal it in less than a minute. The new chatbot tool, DoNotPay, uses previously successful appeal letters to draw up a customized template, allowing users to avoid courts, legal fees, stress, and having to use a lawyer.
So far, the free app has overturned 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York. With a success rate of 64%, DoNotPay has appealed $4 million in parking fines in just two cities in only nine months of operation. In 2014, New York City collected $546 million in revenue from parking tickets.
Stanford freshman Joshua Bowder created the app after spending an exorbitant amount of time crafting his own appeals for parking tickets. He read thousands of pages of documents related to parking tickets released under the Freedom of Information Act and consulted a traffic lawyer. Then, using PHP and Javascript, he created a conversation algorithm that aggregates keywords, pronouns, and word order. Like many chatbots, Browder’s app becomes more intelligent each time it is used.
DoNotPay is not commercial and Josh plans to keep it that way. In an interview with Anti-Media, Josh said he was driven by a sense of social justice and a desire to help vulnerable people who are exploited by policing-for-profit schemes. Josh also wants to use technology like artificial intelligence for humanitarian purposes.
He finds it “irritating and disappointing” that bots are usually created for vapid commercial uses. In reality, he says, algorithmic intelligence and chatbots are a “humanitarian goldmine.”
DoNotPay also assists with delayed or canceled flights, payment-protection insurance (PPI) claims, and even legally disclosing an HIV-positive health status.
Josh describes his creation as “the first robot lawyer.” People are describing him as the “Robin Hood of the Internet.”
“If it is one day possible for any citizen to get the same standard of legal representation as a billionaire,” Browder says,“how can that not be a good thing?”
Got a bullshit parking ticket? Now you can appeal it in less than a minute. The new chatbot tool, DoNotPay, uses previously successful appeal letters to draw up a customized template, allowing users to avoid courts, legal fees, stress, and having to use a lawyer.
So far, the free app has overturned 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York. With a success rate of 64%, DoNotPay has appealed $4 million in parking fines in just two cities in only nine months of operation. In 2014, New York City collected $546 million in revenue from parking tickets.
Stanford freshman Joshua Bowder created the app after spending an exorbitant amount of time crafting his own appeals for parking tickets. He read thousands of pages of documents related to parking tickets released under the Freedom of Information Act and consulted a traffic lawyer. Then, using PHP and Javascript, he created a conversation algorithm that aggregates keywords, pronouns, and word order. Like many chatbots, Browder’s app becomes more intelligent each time it is used.DoNotPay is not commercial and Josh plans to keep it that way. In an interview with Anti-Media, Josh said he was driven by a sense of social justice and a desire to help vulnerable people who are exploited by policing-for-profit schemes. Josh also wants to use technology like artificial intelligence for humanitarian purposes.
He finds it “irritating and disappointing” that bots are usually created for vapid commercial uses. In reality, he says, algorithmic intelligence and chatbots are a “humanitarian goldmine.”
DoNotPay also assists with delayed or canceled flights, payment-protection insurance (PPI) claims, and even legally disclosing an HIV-positive health status.
Josh describes his creation as “the first robot lawyer.” People are describing him as the “Robin Hood of the Internet.”
“If it is one day possible for any citizen to get the same standard of legal representation as a billionaire,” Browder says,“how can that not be a good thing?”
by Jake Anderson, Anti-Media | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Government Under Review
Like many good arguments, this one started over a stiff drink. An Earl Grey MarTEAni, to be precise.
In January 2010, Nathalie Louissaint, a New York City health inspector, visited Pegu Club, an upscale cocktail bar. She watched as the bartender mixed the signature tea-infused drink. Borrowing a technique from the nineteenth century, the bartender added raw egg whites, which give the drink a silky body and an alluring layer of foam. Louissaint decided that the raw egg warning on the menu was insufficient and cited the bar for a health code violation.
The citation outraged many. Paul Clarke, a Seattle-based food writer, was perplexed by the department’s rigid position on raw eggs, writing on the website Serious Eats, “Does this mean the health department will begin targeting restaurants that serve raw eggs in a Caesar salad?” Others decried the health department’s seeming mandate to use pasteurized eggs, but those, said Pegu Club owner Audrey Sanders, “impart this really funky wet-diaper nose.” One bartender, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal, told the New York Times, “If they make it illegal to serve egg-white drinks, that would be Hurricane Katrina for us.” In response to the uproar, the health department overruled the inspector.
This confusion is no outlier. Nationwide, implementation of health codes varies dramatically across inspectors and health departments. In Seattle, two inspectors observed Caesar salad dressing prepared with raw (unpasteurized) eggs in the same restaurant, but disagreed about whether to cite a violation. Contrary to New York City health department guidelines, New York State’s website doesn’t mention menu warnings, instead admonishing, “Consider using commercially pasteurized eggs in recipes that use eggs or consider removing the item from your menu.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) document that 80 percent of restaurants nonetheless use unpasteurized eggs.
When it comes down to it, the marTEAni fight is not so much about eggs as it is an endemic challenge across government. From airport security checkpoints and routine traffic stops to home construction permits, citizens and government interact frequently through individual officials. At times, the decisions of these frontline government officials can seem disturbingly arbitrary.
A bar can always take a drink off its menu, but sometimes the arbitrariness can have more serious impact. In 2013 the Administrative Conference of the United States reported that administrative law judges grant Social Security Disability claims at rates ranging from 4 percent to 98 percent. In asylum adjudication, New York immigration judges vary in their grant rates from 6 percent to 91 percent when cases are assigned irrespective of merits, leading to a denunciation of the process as “refugee roulette.” A study of Illinois child-welfare case managers found substantial differences in decisions to place children in foster care based on allegations of abuse or neglect. It is no wonder that scholars assail the child-welfare system as a form of institutional “chaos, oppression, and tragic ineffectiveness.” In nuclear safety, violation-detection rates can vary from less than 10 percent to more than 60 percent depending on the inspector. The regulatory requirements are so complex that one nuclear official conceded, “Nondetection is endemic.”
Inconsistency breeds mistrust. A city analyst in New York described the city’s restaurant inspection system as “arbitrary” and concluded, “If we can’t trust the Health Department to provide real scientific data . . . then we can’t trust any agency.” Businesses feel this too. An owner of a fast-food chain with many locations across Washington state observed sharp differences in how individual restaurants were scored and how the same restaurant was scored over time, despite his chain’s uniform food-safety protocol: “We always thought we were doing a great job in putting safety first; but it turns out in many, if not most, cases, inspectors were either not being as thorough as they could have been or were only verbally coaching” rather than writing violations. One Virginia bartender, responding to the Pegu Club episode, said, “I’m not 100 percent sure what the law is.” At a staff meeting in King County, Washington, health inspectors expressed similar misgivings. They hoped for better consistency in order to build “credibility and trust.”
The pervasiveness of these challenges leads some to point fingers, some to throw up their hands, and others to bemoan government altogether. If you are on the right, blame public sector unions, civil service protections, or listless bureaucrats. If you are on the left, blame underfunding, deregulation, or the lack of federal oversight. Governments generally cannot resolve these underlying ideological battles, but they must find ways to address the consistency of frontline decision making nonetheless. The question is, how?
The Peer Review Experiment
One possible solution is peer review. If frontline government officials could review and deliberate over each other’s work, the quality and consistency of decision making might improve. While isolated examples of such peer review exist, we have regrettably little systematic evidence of peer review’s effectiveness in the public sector. The reason is understandable. Due to perceived costs, logistics, and ethical and political concerns, rigorous experiments can be difficult to design and implement when it comes to regulation.
Beginning in 2014, we designed a randomized, controlled trial to test the effectiveness of peer review with the food safety staff of King County, where Seattle is located. Half of the inspection staff was randomly assigned to engage in peer review. For sixteen weeks, these inspectors spent one day per week with a randomly selected fellow inspector, taking turns conducting inspections and independently scoring health code violations. We then used information from these peer inspections to identify and train for violations that cause the most confusion.
The results were remarkable.We discovered that, when observing identical conditions in restaurants, health inspectors disagreed nearly 60 percent of the time.
by Daniel E. Ho and Becky Elias, Boston Review | Read more:
In January 2010, Nathalie Louissaint, a New York City health inspector, visited Pegu Club, an upscale cocktail bar. She watched as the bartender mixed the signature tea-infused drink. Borrowing a technique from the nineteenth century, the bartender added raw egg whites, which give the drink a silky body and an alluring layer of foam. Louissaint decided that the raw egg warning on the menu was insufficient and cited the bar for a health code violation.
The citation outraged many. Paul Clarke, a Seattle-based food writer, was perplexed by the department’s rigid position on raw eggs, writing on the website Serious Eats, “Does this mean the health department will begin targeting restaurants that serve raw eggs in a Caesar salad?” Others decried the health department’s seeming mandate to use pasteurized eggs, but those, said Pegu Club owner Audrey Sanders, “impart this really funky wet-diaper nose.” One bartender, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal, told the New York Times, “If they make it illegal to serve egg-white drinks, that would be Hurricane Katrina for us.” In response to the uproar, the health department overruled the inspector.This confusion is no outlier. Nationwide, implementation of health codes varies dramatically across inspectors and health departments. In Seattle, two inspectors observed Caesar salad dressing prepared with raw (unpasteurized) eggs in the same restaurant, but disagreed about whether to cite a violation. Contrary to New York City health department guidelines, New York State’s website doesn’t mention menu warnings, instead admonishing, “Consider using commercially pasteurized eggs in recipes that use eggs or consider removing the item from your menu.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) document that 80 percent of restaurants nonetheless use unpasteurized eggs.
When it comes down to it, the marTEAni fight is not so much about eggs as it is an endemic challenge across government. From airport security checkpoints and routine traffic stops to home construction permits, citizens and government interact frequently through individual officials. At times, the decisions of these frontline government officials can seem disturbingly arbitrary.
A bar can always take a drink off its menu, but sometimes the arbitrariness can have more serious impact. In 2013 the Administrative Conference of the United States reported that administrative law judges grant Social Security Disability claims at rates ranging from 4 percent to 98 percent. In asylum adjudication, New York immigration judges vary in their grant rates from 6 percent to 91 percent when cases are assigned irrespective of merits, leading to a denunciation of the process as “refugee roulette.” A study of Illinois child-welfare case managers found substantial differences in decisions to place children in foster care based on allegations of abuse or neglect. It is no wonder that scholars assail the child-welfare system as a form of institutional “chaos, oppression, and tragic ineffectiveness.” In nuclear safety, violation-detection rates can vary from less than 10 percent to more than 60 percent depending on the inspector. The regulatory requirements are so complex that one nuclear official conceded, “Nondetection is endemic.”
Inconsistency breeds mistrust. A city analyst in New York described the city’s restaurant inspection system as “arbitrary” and concluded, “If we can’t trust the Health Department to provide real scientific data . . . then we can’t trust any agency.” Businesses feel this too. An owner of a fast-food chain with many locations across Washington state observed sharp differences in how individual restaurants were scored and how the same restaurant was scored over time, despite his chain’s uniform food-safety protocol: “We always thought we were doing a great job in putting safety first; but it turns out in many, if not most, cases, inspectors were either not being as thorough as they could have been or were only verbally coaching” rather than writing violations. One Virginia bartender, responding to the Pegu Club episode, said, “I’m not 100 percent sure what the law is.” At a staff meeting in King County, Washington, health inspectors expressed similar misgivings. They hoped for better consistency in order to build “credibility and trust.”
The pervasiveness of these challenges leads some to point fingers, some to throw up their hands, and others to bemoan government altogether. If you are on the right, blame public sector unions, civil service protections, or listless bureaucrats. If you are on the left, blame underfunding, deregulation, or the lack of federal oversight. Governments generally cannot resolve these underlying ideological battles, but they must find ways to address the consistency of frontline decision making nonetheless. The question is, how?
The Peer Review Experiment
One possible solution is peer review. If frontline government officials could review and deliberate over each other’s work, the quality and consistency of decision making might improve. While isolated examples of such peer review exist, we have regrettably little systematic evidence of peer review’s effectiveness in the public sector. The reason is understandable. Due to perceived costs, logistics, and ethical and political concerns, rigorous experiments can be difficult to design and implement when it comes to regulation.
Beginning in 2014, we designed a randomized, controlled trial to test the effectiveness of peer review with the food safety staff of King County, where Seattle is located. Half of the inspection staff was randomly assigned to engage in peer review. For sixteen weeks, these inspectors spent one day per week with a randomly selected fellow inspector, taking turns conducting inspections and independently scoring health code violations. We then used information from these peer inspections to identify and train for violations that cause the most confusion.
The results were remarkable.We discovered that, when observing identical conditions in restaurants, health inspectors disagreed nearly 60 percent of the time.
by Daniel E. Ho and Becky Elias, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Even More Bureaucrats (1993) by Synnøve Anker Aurdal / photo by Bosc d'Anjou
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Amazon Has Swallowed Downtown Seattle
Walk down Seventh Avenue in downtown Seattle and you can't miss them: three gigantic spheres resembling melted-together Milk Duds rising in the shadow of Amazon’s new 500-foot-tall office tower. The architectural oddity has already become a tourist attraction and social media phenomenon. Passersby snap photographs and watch construction crews attach glass panes to the steel frames. Images stream through Instagram and Twitter.
When they open in 2018, the 100-foot-tall orbs—Amazon calls them Biospheres—will host more than 300 plant species from around the world, creating what the company sees as the workplace of the future. Amazonians will be able to break from their daily labors to walk amid the greenery along suspension bridges and climb into meeting spaces resembling bird nests perched in mature trees, where the company expects them to brainstorm—and perhaps even invent the next billion-dollar opportunity.
Amazon's new headquarters was designed to project a forward-thinking company eager to help employees be more productive, creative and happy by providing a connection to nature. But the most trend-setting and appealing feature of the new complex is most likely its location: plopped between glass and steel high-rises on a busy street in downtown Seattle where food trucks are abundant, apartments are within walking distance and Happy Hour greets employees at quitting time.
Over the years, founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos has made clear his disdain for the free lunches, massages and other perks commonplace in the suburban enclaves of Google, Apple and Facebook. His big advantage in the amenities arms race is a commitment to preserving an urban campus, no matter how big his company gets.
Other tech companies are following his lead by squeezing new offices into cities where millennials prefer to live. LinkedIn consolidated staff scattered around San Francisco into a 26-story tower in March. Salesforce.com will be the anchor tenant in a 61-story skyscraper a few miles away that will be the city's tallest upon completion in 2018. Uber has plans for a new headquarters in San Francisco's Mission Bay. Industrial-age leviathans are doing it, too. General Electric is shifting from suburban Connecticut to Boston, while McDonald's is moving from Oak Brook, Illinois, to Chicago.
Amazon's is the most ambitious gambit of them all. When its spheres and three surrounding towers are completed, the company will have 10 million square feet of office space in Seattle, more than 15 percent of the city's inventory, on a campus that occupies more than 10 square blocks. That will provide space for Amazon to more than double in size, to 50,000 Seattle workers in the next decade. "How big can Amazon get and stay in Seattle—that’s what they’re trying to find out," says Glenn Kelman, founder and CEO of online real estate company Redfin. "Can you create a massive company in the middle of a city?"
Amazon's commitment to Seattle began long before the spheres were conceived. In 2010, the company moved to South Lake Union from leased space it was outgrowing in an old medical building. Amazon leased retail space on the ground floor of its office buildings to hand-picked bars, restaurants and coffee shops, speeding the neighborhood's transformation from a hodgepodge of car dealerships and second-hand stores into a vibrant business district where people could work, live and hang out.
Veteran fine-dining restaurateur Tom Douglas was among the businesses lured by a growing concentration of well-paid tech workers. His survey of Amazon workers indicated they wanted cheap burgers and beer, which encouraged him to break from his traditional model and open the Brave Horse Tavern with a wide assortment of local brews, pub fare and long tables for family-style seating. "I'm sure glad we did that survey, because we might not have gone with this concept otherwise," Douglas said. "At the time, none of us realized how big and fast Amazon would grow." The economic ripples from Amazon have since pushed beyond burger joints and cafes. Yellow cranes mark the skyline where new office towers, hotels and luxury apartments are rising.
Just six years after relocating, Amazon has outgrown South Lake Union and is marching toward the city's urban core. The spheres, designed by architecture firm NBBJ, are Amazon's boldest statement yet in the first project it's building from the ground up.
They were inspired by Amazon research indicating that a key thing missing from typical work environments is a link to the natural world, said John Schoettler, the company's global real estate director. The challenge was creating an environment conducive to plants without being hot and muggy like a greenhouse; the spheres had to be comfortable for humans.
A staff horticulturist scoured the globe for species that can thrive in a cool, dry environment. Many of the plants are endangered species, meaning that the spheres double as a conservation project. Schoettler said the design was chosen to be an architectural focal point in the city, similar to the iconic Space Needle. "We wanted to create a place employees would be proud of and proud to bring their families," he said.
Inevitably, the company's growing presence is making it a scapegoat for common urban woes such as traffic jams and rising rents. New, luxury, one-bedroom apartments packed with amenities that appeal to young urban tech workers fetch upwards of $4,000 a month, putting them out of reach of the Starbucks barista.
To some long-time Seattleites, the new South Lake Union feels sterile, like an open-air mall. Wide sidewalks are devoid of cigarette butts and shattered beer bottles. Street people banging bongos and strumming acoustic guitars with mangy dogs in tow, a common sight in Seattle’s retail and financial districts, are conspicuously absent. South Lake Union has become "a dormitory for Amazon and now Facebook and Google," said Jeff Reifman, a tech consultant.
When they open in 2018, the 100-foot-tall orbs—Amazon calls them Biospheres—will host more than 300 plant species from around the world, creating what the company sees as the workplace of the future. Amazonians will be able to break from their daily labors to walk amid the greenery along suspension bridges and climb into meeting spaces resembling bird nests perched in mature trees, where the company expects them to brainstorm—and perhaps even invent the next billion-dollar opportunity.
Amazon's new headquarters was designed to project a forward-thinking company eager to help employees be more productive, creative and happy by providing a connection to nature. But the most trend-setting and appealing feature of the new complex is most likely its location: plopped between glass and steel high-rises on a busy street in downtown Seattle where food trucks are abundant, apartments are within walking distance and Happy Hour greets employees at quitting time.Over the years, founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos has made clear his disdain for the free lunches, massages and other perks commonplace in the suburban enclaves of Google, Apple and Facebook. His big advantage in the amenities arms race is a commitment to preserving an urban campus, no matter how big his company gets.
Other tech companies are following his lead by squeezing new offices into cities where millennials prefer to live. LinkedIn consolidated staff scattered around San Francisco into a 26-story tower in March. Salesforce.com will be the anchor tenant in a 61-story skyscraper a few miles away that will be the city's tallest upon completion in 2018. Uber has plans for a new headquarters in San Francisco's Mission Bay. Industrial-age leviathans are doing it, too. General Electric is shifting from suburban Connecticut to Boston, while McDonald's is moving from Oak Brook, Illinois, to Chicago.
Amazon's is the most ambitious gambit of them all. When its spheres and three surrounding towers are completed, the company will have 10 million square feet of office space in Seattle, more than 15 percent of the city's inventory, on a campus that occupies more than 10 square blocks. That will provide space for Amazon to more than double in size, to 50,000 Seattle workers in the next decade. "How big can Amazon get and stay in Seattle—that’s what they’re trying to find out," says Glenn Kelman, founder and CEO of online real estate company Redfin. "Can you create a massive company in the middle of a city?"
Amazon's commitment to Seattle began long before the spheres were conceived. In 2010, the company moved to South Lake Union from leased space it was outgrowing in an old medical building. Amazon leased retail space on the ground floor of its office buildings to hand-picked bars, restaurants and coffee shops, speeding the neighborhood's transformation from a hodgepodge of car dealerships and second-hand stores into a vibrant business district where people could work, live and hang out.
Veteran fine-dining restaurateur Tom Douglas was among the businesses lured by a growing concentration of well-paid tech workers. His survey of Amazon workers indicated they wanted cheap burgers and beer, which encouraged him to break from his traditional model and open the Brave Horse Tavern with a wide assortment of local brews, pub fare and long tables for family-style seating. "I'm sure glad we did that survey, because we might not have gone with this concept otherwise," Douglas said. "At the time, none of us realized how big and fast Amazon would grow." The economic ripples from Amazon have since pushed beyond burger joints and cafes. Yellow cranes mark the skyline where new office towers, hotels and luxury apartments are rising.
Just six years after relocating, Amazon has outgrown South Lake Union and is marching toward the city's urban core. The spheres, designed by architecture firm NBBJ, are Amazon's boldest statement yet in the first project it's building from the ground up.
They were inspired by Amazon research indicating that a key thing missing from typical work environments is a link to the natural world, said John Schoettler, the company's global real estate director. The challenge was creating an environment conducive to plants without being hot and muggy like a greenhouse; the spheres had to be comfortable for humans.
A staff horticulturist scoured the globe for species that can thrive in a cool, dry environment. Many of the plants are endangered species, meaning that the spheres double as a conservation project. Schoettler said the design was chosen to be an architectural focal point in the city, similar to the iconic Space Needle. "We wanted to create a place employees would be proud of and proud to bring their families," he said.
Inevitably, the company's growing presence is making it a scapegoat for common urban woes such as traffic jams and rising rents. New, luxury, one-bedroom apartments packed with amenities that appeal to young urban tech workers fetch upwards of $4,000 a month, putting them out of reach of the Starbucks barista.
To some long-time Seattleites, the new South Lake Union feels sterile, like an open-air mall. Wide sidewalks are devoid of cigarette butts and shattered beer bottles. Street people banging bongos and strumming acoustic guitars with mangy dogs in tow, a common sight in Seattle’s retail and financial districts, are conspicuously absent. South Lake Union has become "a dormitory for Amazon and now Facebook and Google," said Jeff Reifman, a tech consultant.
by Spence Soper and Peter Robison, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg
Coming Soon: Gut Bacteria That Actually Cure Your Disease
Everybody's talking about gut bacteria.
Pick a disease or disorder, and somebody, somewhere, has said that a probiotic supplement—an over-the-counter, unregulated pill usually filled with a single strain of friendly gut bacteria—might cure it, whether it’s cancer, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or a yeast infection.
But there’s very little evidence that probiotic supplements do any good. “There’s a lot of promise here but not a lot of proof yet,” said Cliff McDonald, associate director for science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.
That promise has built a $34 billion market as of last year, according to a new report from BCC Research, $6 billion of which was in supplements. The biggest share of the probiotics market was in food and beverages, at $24.8 billion.
Seres Therapeutics, a microbiome-based biopharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Mass., is developing a pill, subject to a rigorous approval process under the Food and Drug Administration, to tackle recurrent Clostridium difficile. (The digestive system's microbiome is the community of healthy gut bacteria that normally reside in the body.) Half a million people a year are infected with C. diff in the U.S., the CDC estimates, with 29,000 annual deaths related to the diarrheic bacterium. More than 65 percent of C. diff infections involve exposure in a health-care facility, according to a 2015 study, creating more than $4.8 billion in excess health-care costs at acute-care facilities alone.
Seres aims to put the science behind a proven treatment of recurrent C. diff, fecal transplants, in a pill, which wouldn't require a colonoscopy. Like probiotic supplements, it’s a gut bacteria product. Unlike the supplements, by the time it’s available it will have gone through the FDA wringer. It will contain about 50 strains of bacteria proven effective in treating C. diff and will require a doctor's prescription.
Recurrent C. diff is an obvious entry point for Seres, said Chief Executive Officer Roger Pomerantz. “We asked, what is the lowest-hanging fruit?” But it’s hardly the end. The company has built a microbiome library of 14,000 strains of human bacteria it hopes will help it treat a range of diseases, eventually without needing feces at all.
Seres has embarked on the research with some pretty lofty goals, including finding treatments for obesity, liver disease, and cancer. It has partnerships with Massachusetts General Hospital, the Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and other respected medical institutions.
“We will figure out exactly what’s wrong with the microbiome, design a drug, and then pull the organisms out with our library, never touching a human donation,” Pomerantz said.
For nearly two thousand years, doctors have looked to this unlikeliest of places for medicine. One of the earliest documented applications is from the fourth-century Chinese medical doctor Ge Hong, whose “yellow soup” recipe to treat diarrhea included a healthy person’s dried or fermented feces. Sixteen hundred years later, in 1958, patients infected with C. diff received the first known human fecal transplants.
Today the effectiveness of fecal transplants (formally known as fecal microbiota transplants) to treat recurrent C. diff is supported by a long list of studies, with researchers attributing the results to the restoration of the microbiome. OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank, shipped 1,828 treatments in 2014, a number that ballooned to 7,140 treatments in 2015 and looks to be eclipsed this year, with 4,323 treatments shipped to its clinical partners through May 31. And these numbers don’t take into account the transplants performed through directed fecal donations.
Seres's lead product candidate, SER-109, will treat recurrent C. diff with four capsules taken orally instead of with transplants. While fecal matter is the raw material for the pills, the final product consists only of the spores necessary to treat the infection, which will have been extracted and purified.
by Deena Shanker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Dr. Kari Lounatmaa/Getty Images
Pick a disease or disorder, and somebody, somewhere, has said that a probiotic supplement—an over-the-counter, unregulated pill usually filled with a single strain of friendly gut bacteria—might cure it, whether it’s cancer, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or a yeast infection.
But there’s very little evidence that probiotic supplements do any good. “There’s a lot of promise here but not a lot of proof yet,” said Cliff McDonald, associate director for science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.
That promise has built a $34 billion market as of last year, according to a new report from BCC Research, $6 billion of which was in supplements. The biggest share of the probiotics market was in food and beverages, at $24.8 billion.Seres Therapeutics, a microbiome-based biopharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Mass., is developing a pill, subject to a rigorous approval process under the Food and Drug Administration, to tackle recurrent Clostridium difficile. (The digestive system's microbiome is the community of healthy gut bacteria that normally reside in the body.) Half a million people a year are infected with C. diff in the U.S., the CDC estimates, with 29,000 annual deaths related to the diarrheic bacterium. More than 65 percent of C. diff infections involve exposure in a health-care facility, according to a 2015 study, creating more than $4.8 billion in excess health-care costs at acute-care facilities alone.
Seres aims to put the science behind a proven treatment of recurrent C. diff, fecal transplants, in a pill, which wouldn't require a colonoscopy. Like probiotic supplements, it’s a gut bacteria product. Unlike the supplements, by the time it’s available it will have gone through the FDA wringer. It will contain about 50 strains of bacteria proven effective in treating C. diff and will require a doctor's prescription.
Recurrent C. diff is an obvious entry point for Seres, said Chief Executive Officer Roger Pomerantz. “We asked, what is the lowest-hanging fruit?” But it’s hardly the end. The company has built a microbiome library of 14,000 strains of human bacteria it hopes will help it treat a range of diseases, eventually without needing feces at all.
Seres has embarked on the research with some pretty lofty goals, including finding treatments for obesity, liver disease, and cancer. It has partnerships with Massachusetts General Hospital, the Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and other respected medical institutions.
“We will figure out exactly what’s wrong with the microbiome, design a drug, and then pull the organisms out with our library, never touching a human donation,” Pomerantz said.
For nearly two thousand years, doctors have looked to this unlikeliest of places for medicine. One of the earliest documented applications is from the fourth-century Chinese medical doctor Ge Hong, whose “yellow soup” recipe to treat diarrhea included a healthy person’s dried or fermented feces. Sixteen hundred years later, in 1958, patients infected with C. diff received the first known human fecal transplants.
Today the effectiveness of fecal transplants (formally known as fecal microbiota transplants) to treat recurrent C. diff is supported by a long list of studies, with researchers attributing the results to the restoration of the microbiome. OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank, shipped 1,828 treatments in 2014, a number that ballooned to 7,140 treatments in 2015 and looks to be eclipsed this year, with 4,323 treatments shipped to its clinical partners through May 31. And these numbers don’t take into account the transplants performed through directed fecal donations.
Seres's lead product candidate, SER-109, will treat recurrent C. diff with four capsules taken orally instead of with transplants. While fecal matter is the raw material for the pills, the final product consists only of the spores necessary to treat the infection, which will have been extracted and purified.
by Deena Shanker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Dr. Kari Lounatmaa/Getty Images
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