Saturday, July 16, 2016
Friday, July 15, 2016
An Assault On Us All
There is a peculiar horror in the attack in Nice which has killed at least 84 men, women and children. The weapon, the target and even the place might have been chosen to maximise the damage caused to the web of trust in one another’s intentions that sustains civilisation. Though we don’t know for sure whether this was a deliberate act of terrorism it is possible that all were deliberately chosen with this in mind. Although many attacks are carefully planned, others arise spontaneously when local or personal grievances are given a global habitation and a name by jihadi ideology. That sort is almost more frightening.
The victims, as so often in these atrocities all around the world, were entirely innocent people, often whole families, caught up in a moment of celebration, one of those times when everyone in the crowd seems united in a common determination to enjoy the moment until the unthinkable violence strikes. Whether it is the Shia crowds celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast in the recent Baghdad bombing (which killed 156), concert-goers of last autumn’s atrocity in Paris, or the 74 Christians celebrating Easter in a park in Lahore in April the intended message is always the same: that nowhere is safe and no one can be trusted.
The weapon, too, though it has never been wielded to such deadly effect, is one that maximises the distrust and fear that these attacks intend. A truck on the streets is about as normal and everyday a sight as can be imagined. Of course there are no physical barriers to stop it from mounting the pavement but the restraints of civilisation and of sanity which we rely on make it almost unthinkable that this will happen.
War tears all restraint away. In war everything is a potential weapon and unexpectedness can make weapons more deadly. The use of civilian aircraft in the 9/11 attacks in the US is only the deadliest example of this and the disruption and loss of innocence they caused to all civilian air travel since then one of the minor victories of Osama bin Laden.
Even the city of Nice is one of the most vulnerable places in France to this kind of attack, not just because of the presence of large crowds on a road which we have been suddenly forced to see as hideously exposed, but because of its already divided politics, with a strong Front National vote which this atrocity will do nothing to diminish.
There is no guarantee possible that such an attack will not happen again. It may very well happen in Britain. We have been lucky here and not all our luck has been earned. In any case, the enemy need only be lucky once, whereas we must be lucky every time. (...)
France, and Britain too, is under attack from an apocalyptic blend of politics and religion. The dreadful simplicity of war can make use of every kind of human material, from the cold and rational planner to the angry criminal thug or the psychologically disturbed. There is no single jihadi type any more than there is a single route to radicalisation, something that makes the task of the security services much harder.
The challenge to our values is at the same time political, religious, military and social. So must the response be. This has implications that go beyond politics or security policies. Acts of war like the atrocity in Nice are above all affronts to the decency that all human beings have in common: as ordinary unheroic citizens we can stand in solidarity with the ordinary citizens of Nice and share small acts of common decency with our neighbours.
The victims, as so often in these atrocities all around the world, were entirely innocent people, often whole families, caught up in a moment of celebration, one of those times when everyone in the crowd seems united in a common determination to enjoy the moment until the unthinkable violence strikes. Whether it is the Shia crowds celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast in the recent Baghdad bombing (which killed 156), concert-goers of last autumn’s atrocity in Paris, or the 74 Christians celebrating Easter in a park in Lahore in April the intended message is always the same: that nowhere is safe and no one can be trusted.The weapon, too, though it has never been wielded to such deadly effect, is one that maximises the distrust and fear that these attacks intend. A truck on the streets is about as normal and everyday a sight as can be imagined. Of course there are no physical barriers to stop it from mounting the pavement but the restraints of civilisation and of sanity which we rely on make it almost unthinkable that this will happen.
War tears all restraint away. In war everything is a potential weapon and unexpectedness can make weapons more deadly. The use of civilian aircraft in the 9/11 attacks in the US is only the deadliest example of this and the disruption and loss of innocence they caused to all civilian air travel since then one of the minor victories of Osama bin Laden.
Even the city of Nice is one of the most vulnerable places in France to this kind of attack, not just because of the presence of large crowds on a road which we have been suddenly forced to see as hideously exposed, but because of its already divided politics, with a strong Front National vote which this atrocity will do nothing to diminish.
There is no guarantee possible that such an attack will not happen again. It may very well happen in Britain. We have been lucky here and not all our luck has been earned. In any case, the enemy need only be lucky once, whereas we must be lucky every time. (...)
France, and Britain too, is under attack from an apocalyptic blend of politics and religion. The dreadful simplicity of war can make use of every kind of human material, from the cold and rational planner to the angry criminal thug or the psychologically disturbed. There is no single jihadi type any more than there is a single route to radicalisation, something that makes the task of the security services much harder.
The challenge to our values is at the same time political, religious, military and social. So must the response be. This has implications that go beyond politics or security policies. Acts of war like the atrocity in Nice are above all affronts to the decency that all human beings have in common: as ordinary unheroic citizens we can stand in solidarity with the ordinary citizens of Nice and share small acts of common decency with our neighbours.
by Editors, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: : Francois Mori/AP
Too Big to Jail: Eric Holder’s Longtime Excuse for Not Prosecuting Banks Just Crashed and Burned
[ed. We've had a terrible string of AGs for quite a while now... remember Ashcroft and Gonzalez? Holder was a Wall Street lackey through and through. Was there ever any doubt?]
Eric Holder has long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.
A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.
When asked on June 8 why his Justice Department did not equally apply the criminal laws to financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Holder told the platform drafting panel of the Democratic National Committee that it was laboring under a “misperception.”
He told the panel: “The question you need to ask yourself is, if we could have made those cases, do you think we would not have? Do you think that these very aggressive U.S. attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”
The report — the result of a three-year investigation — shows that aggressive attorneys did want to prosecute HSBC, but Holder overruled them.
In September 2012, the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section (AFMLS) formally recommended that HSBC be prosecuted for its numerous financial crimes.
The history: From 2006 to 2010, HSBC failed to monitor billions of dollars of U.S. dollar purchases with drug trafficking proceeds in Mexico. It also conducted business going back to the mid-1990s on behalf of customers in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma, while they were under sanctions. Such transactions were banned by U.S. law.
Newly public internal Treasury Department records show that AFMLS Chief Jennifer Shasky wanted to seek a guilty plea for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. “DoJ is mulling over the ramifications that could flow from such an approach and plans to finalize its decision this week,” reads an email from September 4, 2012, to senior Treasury officials. On September 7, Treasury official Dennis Wood describes the AFMLS decision as an “internal recommendation to ask the bank [to] plead guilty.” It was a “bombshell,” Wood wrote, because of “the implications of a criminal plea,” and “the sheer amount of the proposed fines and forfeitures.”
But after British financial minister George Osborne complained to the Federal Reserve chairman and the Treasury Secretary that DOJ was unfairly targeting a British bank, senior Justice Department leadership reportedly sought to “better understand the collateral consequences of a conviction/plea before taking such a dramatic step.”
The report documents how Holder and his top associates were concerned about the impact that prosecuting HSBC would have on the global economy. And, in particular, they worried that a guilty plea would trigger a hearing over whether to revoke HSBC’s charter to do banking in the United States.
According to internal documents, the DOJ then went dark for nearly two months, refusing to participate in interagency calls about HSBC. Finally,on November 7, Holder presented HSBC with a “take it or leave it” offer of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would involve a cash settlement and future monitoring of HSBC.
No guilty plea was required.
But even the “take it or leave it” offer was apparently not the last word. HSBC was able to negotiate for nearly a month after Holder presented that offer, getting more favorable terms in the ultimate $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement, announced on December 11, 2012.
The original settlement documents would have forced any HSBC executive officers to void their year-end bonuses if they showed future failures of anti-money laundering compliance. The final documents say that, in the event of such failures, senior executives merely “could” have their bonuses clawed back.
In addition, HSBC successfully negotiated to have individual executives immunized from prosecution over transactions with foreign terrorist organizations and other sanctioned entities, even though the original agreement only covered the anti-money laundering violations and explicitly left open the possibility of prosecuting individuals.
As a Justice Department functionary in 1999, Holder wrote the infamous “collateral consequences” memo, advising prosecutors to take into account economic damage that might result from criminally convicting a major corporation.
In 2013, he unwittingly earned his place in history for telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that the size of some of these [financial] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” which became known as the “Too Big to Jail” theory.
Holder told the Democratic platform drafting committee that “it was not lack of desire or lack of resources” that led to the lack of prosecutions for any major bank executive following the financial crisis. “We had in some cases statutory and sometimes factual inabilities to bring the cases that we wanted to bring,” he said.
The HSBC case, however, shows that lack of desire at the highest levels of the Justice Department was indeed the primary reason that no prosecutions took place.
Eric Holder has long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.
A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.When asked on June 8 why his Justice Department did not equally apply the criminal laws to financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Holder told the platform drafting panel of the Democratic National Committee that it was laboring under a “misperception.”
He told the panel: “The question you need to ask yourself is, if we could have made those cases, do you think we would not have? Do you think that these very aggressive U.S. attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”
The report — the result of a three-year investigation — shows that aggressive attorneys did want to prosecute HSBC, but Holder overruled them.
In September 2012, the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section (AFMLS) formally recommended that HSBC be prosecuted for its numerous financial crimes.
The history: From 2006 to 2010, HSBC failed to monitor billions of dollars of U.S. dollar purchases with drug trafficking proceeds in Mexico. It also conducted business going back to the mid-1990s on behalf of customers in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma, while they were under sanctions. Such transactions were banned by U.S. law.
Newly public internal Treasury Department records show that AFMLS Chief Jennifer Shasky wanted to seek a guilty plea for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. “DoJ is mulling over the ramifications that could flow from such an approach and plans to finalize its decision this week,” reads an email from September 4, 2012, to senior Treasury officials. On September 7, Treasury official Dennis Wood describes the AFMLS decision as an “internal recommendation to ask the bank [to] plead guilty.” It was a “bombshell,” Wood wrote, because of “the implications of a criminal plea,” and “the sheer amount of the proposed fines and forfeitures.”
But after British financial minister George Osborne complained to the Federal Reserve chairman and the Treasury Secretary that DOJ was unfairly targeting a British bank, senior Justice Department leadership reportedly sought to “better understand the collateral consequences of a conviction/plea before taking such a dramatic step.”
The report documents how Holder and his top associates were concerned about the impact that prosecuting HSBC would have on the global economy. And, in particular, they worried that a guilty plea would trigger a hearing over whether to revoke HSBC’s charter to do banking in the United States.
According to internal documents, the DOJ then went dark for nearly two months, refusing to participate in interagency calls about HSBC. Finally,on November 7, Holder presented HSBC with a “take it or leave it” offer of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would involve a cash settlement and future monitoring of HSBC.
No guilty plea was required.
But even the “take it or leave it” offer was apparently not the last word. HSBC was able to negotiate for nearly a month after Holder presented that offer, getting more favorable terms in the ultimate $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement, announced on December 11, 2012.
The original settlement documents would have forced any HSBC executive officers to void their year-end bonuses if they showed future failures of anti-money laundering compliance. The final documents say that, in the event of such failures, senior executives merely “could” have their bonuses clawed back.
In addition, HSBC successfully negotiated to have individual executives immunized from prosecution over transactions with foreign terrorist organizations and other sanctioned entities, even though the original agreement only covered the anti-money laundering violations and explicitly left open the possibility of prosecuting individuals.
As a Justice Department functionary in 1999, Holder wrote the infamous “collateral consequences” memo, advising prosecutors to take into account economic damage that might result from criminally convicting a major corporation.
In 2013, he unwittingly earned his place in history for telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that the size of some of these [financial] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” which became known as the “Too Big to Jail” theory.
Holder told the Democratic platform drafting committee that “it was not lack of desire or lack of resources” that led to the lack of prosecutions for any major bank executive following the financial crisis. “We had in some cases statutory and sometimes factual inabilities to bring the cases that we wanted to bring,” he said.
The HSBC case, however, shows that lack of desire at the highest levels of the Justice Department was indeed the primary reason that no prosecutions took place.
by David Dayen, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
The Suit That Couldn't Be Copied
About two years ago, I became interested in the garments of Davide Taub, the head cutter for Gieves & Hawkes, a house in London at which Alexander McQueen apprenticed, and which has a reputation for designs that are both elegant and daring. A cutter is the equivalent of a designer, and Taub is considered by some to be the finest cutter on Savile Row. I had come across his work on his blog, where he posts images of his more ambitious clothes and their construction. There are images of an alpaca-wool greatcoat whose collar, when upturned, evokes a tulip, and another called the Barrel-Back Overcoat, which, when Taub is shown wearing it, makes him appear large and mysterious and from a different era.
There is also a photograph of one of his most famous garments, a commission from Bentley, which asked four Savile Row houses to make a driving coat inspired by one of the carmaker’s current or historical sedans. You can see the garments on YouTube. Each is well made, but seeing them one after the other is a little like seeing a Golden Delicious apple, a Fuji apple, a McIntosh apple, and, at 3:55, when Taub’s jacket appears, a fighter jet.
His coat is made of a luxurious olive flannel that is obviously sturdy and obviously soft; the pockets are higher than one would expect, and slanted so that one can reach into them easily while sitting. His driving coat uses action pleats behind the sleeves, to ease mobility, and has a detachable bib, much more beautiful than the word implies, with a crosshatched pattern that suggests the days of open-top roadsters. This mixing and matching of historical styles is one of the reasons that his garments are distinctive. They suggest a controlling intelligence.
When I saw Taub’s clothes, I was struck with desire. I have always dressed like a schlub; to do otherwise feels like competing to make myself attractive, which feels like setting myself up for humiliation. But I had the sense that if I wore a garment by Taub, I would become a different person. It was this desire—combined with the fact that one of his overcoats starts at around six thousand dollars, and one of his suits at eight thousand—that made me wonder if I could get a tailor in some less expensive part of the world to copy one of his garments.
This idea did not seem outlandish to me, since I travel to Asia regularly. I was also aware that handmade clothing is not necessarily associated with luxury there, as it in the West. In fact, when I was growing up, in India, machine-made clothes were more expensive than handmade ones, and everybody preferred the former because the handmade ones always had strange problems—one pant leg being shorter than the other, or shirts with a saggy bag of cloth between the shoulder blades. Still, I’d had clothes made by Asian tailors before, and I thought I could find one who could make a sophisticated garment.
I was concerned, though, about copying Taub’s designs—in effect stealing his intellectual property. To me, this seemed cretinous; I’m bothered, after all, that people have posted PDFs of my novels on the Web, so why should I do the same to someone else? With the hope of getting Taub’s blessing, I e-mailed him and asked if he would be willing to comment on and perhaps advise a tailor who was trying to copy what he had done. I told him that I would write an article about this attempt at reproduction.
Among the interesting things about Savile Row is that the people who work there have complete confidence that what they do is genuinely different and better than what other people can do. They appear to invite scrutiny, arguing that when their work is examined, it will be found admirable. Not only did Taub say yes; he also offered to give me a garment, so that it could be taken apart and so that the tailor who was trying to reproduce it would have the best possible information. His reasoning was that something made by Gieves & Hawkes could be taken apart but not put back together again in as lovely a form. Many of the decisions that go into making a garment what it is—how tightly a piece of cloth is pinched when it is sewn, or what angle the needle enters at—leave no trace except in the result.
Gieves & Hawkes sends Taub to New York every February, June, and October to see clients. Last February, I met with him briefly, and we sat in a hotel-lobby restaurant. Taub is slender, dark-haired, bearded. He tends to be so quiet—not initiating conversations but instead waiting for the other person to speak—that he can seem aloof.
I had brought with me a jacket that I’d had made by a tailor in India, whom I thought I might hire to copy Taub’s work. I pulled the jacket from a plastic grocery bag, and he turned it inside out and spread it out over the table. A pained look appeared on his face. After a moment, he asked me how much the jacket had cost to construct. I said two hundred and fifty dollars. He nodded. “One of my pockets costs more than that.” He added, with kindness, “Every garment has its own story. I can’t tell what pressures the tailor was working under. We have customers who will pay a lot and who will give us time to make the best product possible.”
I asked him what faults he was finding in the jacket. He hesitated, but I pressed him. He then explained that the stitching around the buttonholes was very rough, and that this is such a basic mistake that it even has a name: the squashed bug. As Taub analyzed the jacket, I realized that there were also differences between what I had asked the tailor to do and what he had actually done. For instance, I had asked him to sew the canvas, which gives the jacket much of its shape, and not to fuse it, since the latter can cause the jacket to begin puckering after a few years. The tailor had told me that he had done as I requested, but Taub said that this was not the case. (Later, I called the tailor in India, because I’d been speaking with him about reproducing Taub’s work. He said that he had not expected I would find out about the fusing. He sounded angry at me, as if I had created a problem for myself.)
After looking at the jacket, Taub suggested that it might be best that I not try to have replicated one of the more challenging garments he had displayed on his blog. Maybe I should try to get a traditional suit made, instead. Most tailors can make some semblance of a suit, he explained.
In the months that followed, as we e-mailed back and forth about the article, Taub continued to offer me a jacket to take apart, but he ultimately convinced me that a tailor trying to copy Gieves & Hawkes’s work might only become befuddled. He suggested that the best way for a not-so-great tailor to show off his abilities would be by doing what he already does well.
I began to think that I should abandon my project. I no longer believed that a tailor in the developing world could make a Savile Row–level garment, and the essential unfairness of asking somebody in India to try to do so felt increasingly clear. I could, of course, experiment, but I didn’t have money to waste. A high-quality suit made with high-quality cloth, wherever it was made, was bound to cost at least six or seven hundred dollars.
Still, something had happened to me. I had become like a child who wants one particular toy and dreams of it all the time. I somehow knew, intellectually, that what I wanted was not going to happen, and yet I continued down the path I was on.
by Akhil Sharma, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Lakeman
There is also a photograph of one of his most famous garments, a commission from Bentley, which asked four Savile Row houses to make a driving coat inspired by one of the carmaker’s current or historical sedans. You can see the garments on YouTube. Each is well made, but seeing them one after the other is a little like seeing a Golden Delicious apple, a Fuji apple, a McIntosh apple, and, at 3:55, when Taub’s jacket appears, a fighter jet.His coat is made of a luxurious olive flannel that is obviously sturdy and obviously soft; the pockets are higher than one would expect, and slanted so that one can reach into them easily while sitting. His driving coat uses action pleats behind the sleeves, to ease mobility, and has a detachable bib, much more beautiful than the word implies, with a crosshatched pattern that suggests the days of open-top roadsters. This mixing and matching of historical styles is one of the reasons that his garments are distinctive. They suggest a controlling intelligence.
When I saw Taub’s clothes, I was struck with desire. I have always dressed like a schlub; to do otherwise feels like competing to make myself attractive, which feels like setting myself up for humiliation. But I had the sense that if I wore a garment by Taub, I would become a different person. It was this desire—combined with the fact that one of his overcoats starts at around six thousand dollars, and one of his suits at eight thousand—that made me wonder if I could get a tailor in some less expensive part of the world to copy one of his garments.
This idea did not seem outlandish to me, since I travel to Asia regularly. I was also aware that handmade clothing is not necessarily associated with luxury there, as it in the West. In fact, when I was growing up, in India, machine-made clothes were more expensive than handmade ones, and everybody preferred the former because the handmade ones always had strange problems—one pant leg being shorter than the other, or shirts with a saggy bag of cloth between the shoulder blades. Still, I’d had clothes made by Asian tailors before, and I thought I could find one who could make a sophisticated garment.
I was concerned, though, about copying Taub’s designs—in effect stealing his intellectual property. To me, this seemed cretinous; I’m bothered, after all, that people have posted PDFs of my novels on the Web, so why should I do the same to someone else? With the hope of getting Taub’s blessing, I e-mailed him and asked if he would be willing to comment on and perhaps advise a tailor who was trying to copy what he had done. I told him that I would write an article about this attempt at reproduction.
Among the interesting things about Savile Row is that the people who work there have complete confidence that what they do is genuinely different and better than what other people can do. They appear to invite scrutiny, arguing that when their work is examined, it will be found admirable. Not only did Taub say yes; he also offered to give me a garment, so that it could be taken apart and so that the tailor who was trying to reproduce it would have the best possible information. His reasoning was that something made by Gieves & Hawkes could be taken apart but not put back together again in as lovely a form. Many of the decisions that go into making a garment what it is—how tightly a piece of cloth is pinched when it is sewn, or what angle the needle enters at—leave no trace except in the result.
Gieves & Hawkes sends Taub to New York every February, June, and October to see clients. Last February, I met with him briefly, and we sat in a hotel-lobby restaurant. Taub is slender, dark-haired, bearded. He tends to be so quiet—not initiating conversations but instead waiting for the other person to speak—that he can seem aloof.
I had brought with me a jacket that I’d had made by a tailor in India, whom I thought I might hire to copy Taub’s work. I pulled the jacket from a plastic grocery bag, and he turned it inside out and spread it out over the table. A pained look appeared on his face. After a moment, he asked me how much the jacket had cost to construct. I said two hundred and fifty dollars. He nodded. “One of my pockets costs more than that.” He added, with kindness, “Every garment has its own story. I can’t tell what pressures the tailor was working under. We have customers who will pay a lot and who will give us time to make the best product possible.”
I asked him what faults he was finding in the jacket. He hesitated, but I pressed him. He then explained that the stitching around the buttonholes was very rough, and that this is such a basic mistake that it even has a name: the squashed bug. As Taub analyzed the jacket, I realized that there were also differences between what I had asked the tailor to do and what he had actually done. For instance, I had asked him to sew the canvas, which gives the jacket much of its shape, and not to fuse it, since the latter can cause the jacket to begin puckering after a few years. The tailor had told me that he had done as I requested, but Taub said that this was not the case. (Later, I called the tailor in India, because I’d been speaking with him about reproducing Taub’s work. He said that he had not expected I would find out about the fusing. He sounded angry at me, as if I had created a problem for myself.)
After looking at the jacket, Taub suggested that it might be best that I not try to have replicated one of the more challenging garments he had displayed on his blog. Maybe I should try to get a traditional suit made, instead. Most tailors can make some semblance of a suit, he explained.
In the months that followed, as we e-mailed back and forth about the article, Taub continued to offer me a jacket to take apart, but he ultimately convinced me that a tailor trying to copy Gieves & Hawkes’s work might only become befuddled. He suggested that the best way for a not-so-great tailor to show off his abilities would be by doing what he already does well.
I began to think that I should abandon my project. I no longer believed that a tailor in the developing world could make a Savile Row–level garment, and the essential unfairness of asking somebody in India to try to do so felt increasingly clear. I could, of course, experiment, but I didn’t have money to waste. A high-quality suit made with high-quality cloth, wherever it was made, was bound to cost at least six or seven hundred dollars.
Still, something had happened to me. I had become like a child who wants one particular toy and dreams of it all the time. I somehow knew, intellectually, that what I wanted was not going to happen, and yet I continued down the path I was on.
by Akhil Sharma, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Lakeman
Thursday, July 14, 2016
The (G.O.P.) Party’s Over
This column has argued for a while now that there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy. At least a one-party autocracy can order things to get done.
A one-party democracy — that is, a two-party system where only one party is interested in governing and the other is in constant blocking mode, which has characterized America in recent years — is much worse. It can’t do anything big, hard or important.
We can survive a few years of such deadlock in Washington, but we sure can’t take another four or eight years without real decay setting in, and that explains what I’m rooting for in this fall’s elections: I hope Hillary Clinton wins all 50 states and the Democrats take the presidency, the House, the Senate and, effectively, the Supreme Court.
That is the best thing that could happen to America, at least for the next two years — that Donald Trump is not just defeated, but is crushed at the polls. That would have multiple advantages for our country.
First, if Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance (depending on the size of a Democratic majority in the Senate) to pass common-sense gun laws. That would mean restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, which was enacted as part of the 1994 federal crime bill but expired after 10 years, and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun.
I don’t want to touch any citizen’s Second Amendment rights, but the notion that we can’t restrict military weapons that are increasingly being used in mass murders defies common sense — yet it can’t be fixed as long as today’s G.O.P. controls any branch of government.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can borrow $100 billion at close to zero interest for a national infrastructure rebuild to deal with some of the nation’s shameful deferred maintenance of roads, bridges, airports and rails and its inadequate bandwidth, and create more blue-collar jobs that would stimulate growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance to put in place a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would stimulate more clean energy production and allow us to reduce both corporate taxes and personal income taxes, which would also help spur growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can fix whatever needs fixing with Obamacare, without having to junk the whole thing. Right now we have the worst of all worlds: The G.O.P. will not participate in any improvements to Obamacare nor has it offered a credible alternative.
At the same time, if Clinton crushes Trump in November, the message will be sent by the American people that the game he played to become the Republican nominee — through mainstreaming bigotry; name-calling; insulting women, the handicapped, Latinos and Muslims; retweeting posts by hate groups; ignorance of the Constitution; and a willingness to lie and make stuff up with an ease and regularity never seen before at the presidential campaign level — should never be tried by anyone again. The voters’ message, “Go away,” would be deafening.
Finally, if Trump presides over a devastating Republican defeat across all branches of government, the G.O.P. will be forced to do what it has needed to do for a long time: take a time out in the corner. In that corner Republicans could pull out a blank sheet of paper and on one side define the biggest forces shaping the world today — and the challenges and opportunities they pose to America — and on the other side define conservative, market-based policies to address them.
Our country needs a healthy center-right party that can compete with a healthy center-left party. Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs.
The party was once held together by the Cold War. But as that faded away it has been held together only by renting itself out to whoever could energize its base and keep it in power — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association. But at its core there was no real common denominator, no take on the world, no real conservative framework.
The party grew into a messy, untended garden, and Donald Trump was like an invasive species that finally just took over the whole thing.
A one-party democracy — that is, a two-party system where only one party is interested in governing and the other is in constant blocking mode, which has characterized America in recent years — is much worse. It can’t do anything big, hard or important.
We can survive a few years of such deadlock in Washington, but we sure can’t take another four or eight years without real decay setting in, and that explains what I’m rooting for in this fall’s elections: I hope Hillary Clinton wins all 50 states and the Democrats take the presidency, the House, the Senate and, effectively, the Supreme Court.That is the best thing that could happen to America, at least for the next two years — that Donald Trump is not just defeated, but is crushed at the polls. That would have multiple advantages for our country.
First, if Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance (depending on the size of a Democratic majority in the Senate) to pass common-sense gun laws. That would mean restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, which was enacted as part of the 1994 federal crime bill but expired after 10 years, and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun.
I don’t want to touch any citizen’s Second Amendment rights, but the notion that we can’t restrict military weapons that are increasingly being used in mass murders defies common sense — yet it can’t be fixed as long as today’s G.O.P. controls any branch of government.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can borrow $100 billion at close to zero interest for a national infrastructure rebuild to deal with some of the nation’s shameful deferred maintenance of roads, bridges, airports and rails and its inadequate bandwidth, and create more blue-collar jobs that would stimulate growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance to put in place a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would stimulate more clean energy production and allow us to reduce both corporate taxes and personal income taxes, which would also help spur growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can fix whatever needs fixing with Obamacare, without having to junk the whole thing. Right now we have the worst of all worlds: The G.O.P. will not participate in any improvements to Obamacare nor has it offered a credible alternative.
At the same time, if Clinton crushes Trump in November, the message will be sent by the American people that the game he played to become the Republican nominee — through mainstreaming bigotry; name-calling; insulting women, the handicapped, Latinos and Muslims; retweeting posts by hate groups; ignorance of the Constitution; and a willingness to lie and make stuff up with an ease and regularity never seen before at the presidential campaign level — should never be tried by anyone again. The voters’ message, “Go away,” would be deafening.
Finally, if Trump presides over a devastating Republican defeat across all branches of government, the G.O.P. will be forced to do what it has needed to do for a long time: take a time out in the corner. In that corner Republicans could pull out a blank sheet of paper and on one side define the biggest forces shaping the world today — and the challenges and opportunities they pose to America — and on the other side define conservative, market-based policies to address them.
Our country needs a healthy center-right party that can compete with a healthy center-left party. Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs.
The party was once held together by the Cold War. But as that faded away it has been held together only by renting itself out to whoever could energize its base and keep it in power — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association. But at its core there was no real common denominator, no take on the world, no real conservative framework.
The party grew into a messy, untended garden, and Donald Trump was like an invasive species that finally just took over the whole thing.
by Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills, NY Times
3/4: A Psychotherapist in Training
I’m back at Our Lady Of An Undisclosed Location hospital now as a final-year resident. You wouldn’t think a year would make so much difference, but it does.
Identifying residents by their year is easy. The first-years walk around, deer-in-the-headlights look to them, impossible to confuse with anybody except maybe a patient having a panic attack. The middle-year residents are a little more confident. And then the final year residents, leading teams, putting out fires, taking attendings’ abuse in stride.
(True story – last week an attending yelled at me for not knowing some minor detail about uraemic encephalopathy. Later I couldn’t find the detail he’d mentioned, so I asked for a reference, and he said it had been discovered by one of his friends at the big university hospital where he used to work, but the friend had died before he could publish his findings. I think the attending realized as he was talking that it might have been unreasonable to expect me to know a fact whose discoverer took it to the grave with him, but he didn’t apologize.)
It’s only sort of a facade. 99% of things that happen in a hospital are the same things that happened yesterday and the day before, so if you hang around long enough you can learn what to do, or at least which consultant you can call to make it not your problem anymore. On the other hand, Actual Pathology is still a gigantic mystery. I’m not sure this ever changes. One in every X patients with symptoms won’t have any of the things that could possibly be causing those symptoms, won’t respond to any of the treatments that are supposed to cure those symptoms, and you’ll still have family members and hospital administrators demanding that you fix it right now (and in psychiatry, X is probably a single digit number). All you can do is keep up the facade, put your skill at taking attendings’ abuse in stride to good use, and start learning necromancy so you can summon the one big university hospital researcher who studied it but never got a chance to publish their findings.
II.
Two of the most important things I learned during my third year were “Tell me more” and “[awkward silence]”.
“Tell me more,” works for every situation. Part of the problem with psychotherapy is that you’re always expected to have something to say. As a last resort, that thing is “Tell me more”. It sounds like you’re interested. It sounds like you care. And if you’re very lucky, maybe the patient will actually tell you something more, as opposed to their usual plan to stonewall you and hide all possibly useful information.
I saw something on Tumblr the other day which, despite being about a 9-1-1 operator, perfectly sums up being a doctor too:
Or it helps you figure out what’s important to the patient. If someone said “I hate my husband so much,” my natural instinct might be to ask “Why?”. But maybe why isn’t the question the patient cares about. Maybe what she really wants to talk about is how guilty she feels about hating their husband, and if I asked her why then we’d get on a tangent about what the husband is doing that never addresses her real problem. Maybe she’s agonizing every moment about whether or not to divorce him, and losing sleep over it, and coming to me for a sleeping pill. Maybe she’s just hatched a plan to kill him and wants to check it over with me to see if I can find any flaws. In any case I should probably figure out why they hate him eventually, but if their real issue is whether or not I approve of their murder plot then we should probably get to that first.
So instead, it’s “I hate my husband so much.” “Tell me more.”
“I’m feeling depressed.” “Tell me more.”
“Sometimes I think life isn’t worth living.” “Tell me more.”
“Listen, if you don’t give me a prescription for Adderall right now I swear to God that I will stab you right here in this office!” “Tell me more.”
This has seeped into my personal life. I was on a date with a girl earlier this year, and whenever she started telling me about her life I would just say “Tell me more”, and it worked.
And then there’s [awkward silence]. I learned this one from the psychoanalysts. Nobody likes an awkward silence. If a patient tells you something, and you are awkwardly silent, then the patient will rush to fill the awkward silence with whatever they can think of, which will probably be whatever they were holding back the first time they started talking. You won’t believe how well this one works until you try it. Just stay silent long enough, and the other person will tell you everything. It’s better than waterboarding.
The only problem is when two psychiatrists meet. One of my attendings tried to [awkward silence] me at the same time I was trying to [awkward silence] him, and we ended up just staring at each other for five minutes until finally I broke down laughing.
“I see you find something funny,” he said. “Tell me more.”
Identifying residents by their year is easy. The first-years walk around, deer-in-the-headlights look to them, impossible to confuse with anybody except maybe a patient having a panic attack. The middle-year residents are a little more confident. And then the final year residents, leading teams, putting out fires, taking attendings’ abuse in stride.
(True story – last week an attending yelled at me for not knowing some minor detail about uraemic encephalopathy. Later I couldn’t find the detail he’d mentioned, so I asked for a reference, and he said it had been discovered by one of his friends at the big university hospital where he used to work, but the friend had died before he could publish his findings. I think the attending realized as he was talking that it might have been unreasonable to expect me to know a fact whose discoverer took it to the grave with him, but he didn’t apologize.)It’s only sort of a facade. 99% of things that happen in a hospital are the same things that happened yesterday and the day before, so if you hang around long enough you can learn what to do, or at least which consultant you can call to make it not your problem anymore. On the other hand, Actual Pathology is still a gigantic mystery. I’m not sure this ever changes. One in every X patients with symptoms won’t have any of the things that could possibly be causing those symptoms, won’t respond to any of the treatments that are supposed to cure those symptoms, and you’ll still have family members and hospital administrators demanding that you fix it right now (and in psychiatry, X is probably a single digit number). All you can do is keep up the facade, put your skill at taking attendings’ abuse in stride to good use, and start learning necromancy so you can summon the one big university hospital researcher who studied it but never got a chance to publish their findings.
II.
Two of the most important things I learned during my third year were “Tell me more” and “[awkward silence]”.
“Tell me more,” works for every situation. Part of the problem with psychotherapy is that you’re always expected to have something to say. As a last resort, that thing is “Tell me more”. It sounds like you’re interested. It sounds like you care. And if you’re very lucky, maybe the patient will actually tell you something more, as opposed to their usual plan to stonewall you and hide all possibly useful information.
I saw something on Tumblr the other day which, despite being about a 9-1-1 operator, perfectly sums up being a doctor too:
my bf has many interesting stories and observations from his new job as a 911 operator
my favorite is how meandering people are, even in the midst of a terrible emergency
they respond to “what is the emergency” with “well, the thing is, four weeks ago–”
and then he’s like “WHAT IS THE EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW”
and they’re like “so what happened this morning was, i said to my wife, i said–”
“WHAT IS CURRENTLY HAPPENING AT THIS MOMENT”
“oh i’m having a heart attack”And:
my second favorite is how specific he has to get sometimes
like, “what is your emergency?”
“i’m sitting in a pool of blood.”
“… is it… your blood?”
“yes i think so”
“do you know where it’s coming from?”
“probably the stab wound”
“have you been stabbed?”
“oh yah definitely”Psychiatry is like this, except it’s all very vague, and your patients are really suggestable, and people are always afraid that if you just ask specific questions like “Are you depressed?” then they’ll say yes to make you happy and won’t talk about how the real problem is their anxiety or something. So instead, the patient says something like “I’m sitting in a pool of blood”, and I say “Tell me more…”. They say “Well, it’s my blood.” I say “Tell me more…”. After repeating this process a couple of times, we finally get to the stabbing, and the patient doesn’t feel like I railroaded over their chance to tell their story.
Or it helps you figure out what’s important to the patient. If someone said “I hate my husband so much,” my natural instinct might be to ask “Why?”. But maybe why isn’t the question the patient cares about. Maybe what she really wants to talk about is how guilty she feels about hating their husband, and if I asked her why then we’d get on a tangent about what the husband is doing that never addresses her real problem. Maybe she’s agonizing every moment about whether or not to divorce him, and losing sleep over it, and coming to me for a sleeping pill. Maybe she’s just hatched a plan to kill him and wants to check it over with me to see if I can find any flaws. In any case I should probably figure out why they hate him eventually, but if their real issue is whether or not I approve of their murder plot then we should probably get to that first.
So instead, it’s “I hate my husband so much.” “Tell me more.”
“I’m feeling depressed.” “Tell me more.”
“Sometimes I think life isn’t worth living.” “Tell me more.”
“Listen, if you don’t give me a prescription for Adderall right now I swear to God that I will stab you right here in this office!” “Tell me more.”
This has seeped into my personal life. I was on a date with a girl earlier this year, and whenever she started telling me about her life I would just say “Tell me more”, and it worked.
And then there’s [awkward silence]. I learned this one from the psychoanalysts. Nobody likes an awkward silence. If a patient tells you something, and you are awkwardly silent, then the patient will rush to fill the awkward silence with whatever they can think of, which will probably be whatever they were holding back the first time they started talking. You won’t believe how well this one works until you try it. Just stay silent long enough, and the other person will tell you everything. It’s better than waterboarding.
The only problem is when two psychiatrists meet. One of my attendings tried to [awkward silence] me at the same time I was trying to [awkward silence] him, and we ended up just staring at each other for five minutes until finally I broke down laughing.
“I see you find something funny,” he said. “Tell me more.”
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: uncredited
So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors
The United States is producing more research scientists than academia can handle.
We have been told time and again that the United States needs more scientists, but when it comes to some of the most desirable science jobs — tenure-track professorships at universities, where much of the exciting work is done — there is such a surplus of Ph.D.s that in the most popular fields, like biomedicine, fewer than one in six has a chance of joining the club in the foreseeable future.
While they try to get a foot in the door, many spend years after getting their Ph.D. as poorly paid foot soldiers in a system that can afford to exploit them. Even someone as brilliant as Emmanuelle Charpentier, who in 2015 became head of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology after a momentous discovery in gene editing, spent the previous 25 years moving through nine institutions in five countries.
The lure of a tenured job in academia is great — it means a secure, prestigious position directing a lab that does cutting-edge experiments, often carried out by underlings. Yet although many yearn for such jobs, fewer than half of those who earn science or engineering doctorates end up in the sort of academic positions that directly use what they were trained for.
Others, ending up in industry, business or other professions, do interesting work and earn lucrative salaries and can contribute enormously to society. But by the time many give up on academia — four to six years or more for a Ph.D., a decade or more as a postdoc, they are edging toward middle age, having spent their youth in temporary low-paying positions getting highly specialized training they do not need.
Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure.
Every year the market grows tighter, and federal money for research grants, which support most of this research, remains flat. The journey of Dr. Charpentier, says Alexander Ommaya, acting chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, is not so unusual. “It happens,” he said. Job opportunities, he says, “are limited.”
But wait. Don’t we need more trained scientists — the people whose research can lead to new knowledge, new products, new cures for disease? Aren’t some companies importing STEM workers? (...)
“It used to be that the majority who got a Ph.D. in the biological sciences would go into an academic career,” said Dr. Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health. “Now,” he says, “that is very much the minority.”
Many spend years in a holding pattern as postdocs, which are temporary positions, working for a professor and being paid from the professor’s research grant. The average pay in 2016 for a beginning postdoc in the biomedical sciences is around $44,000, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, has not changed since 1998.
Why would any smart person work for so little? The goal for postdocs is to get grants of their own eventually, but the success rate for those applying has plunged.
In 2000, 32 percent of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health resulted in an award. Now it is just 18 percent. And the average age at which the lucky few actually get a grant has steadily increased — it is now 42, up from 35 in 1980, which means biomedical scientists in academia are essentially apprentices until middle age. And the tendency is for the grants to go to scientists who already have them, making it harder and harder to break into the system.
We have been told time and again that the United States needs more scientists, but when it comes to some of the most desirable science jobs — tenure-track professorships at universities, where much of the exciting work is done — there is such a surplus of Ph.D.s that in the most popular fields, like biomedicine, fewer than one in six has a chance of joining the club in the foreseeable future.
While they try to get a foot in the door, many spend years after getting their Ph.D. as poorly paid foot soldiers in a system that can afford to exploit them. Even someone as brilliant as Emmanuelle Charpentier, who in 2015 became head of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology after a momentous discovery in gene editing, spent the previous 25 years moving through nine institutions in five countries.The lure of a tenured job in academia is great — it means a secure, prestigious position directing a lab that does cutting-edge experiments, often carried out by underlings. Yet although many yearn for such jobs, fewer than half of those who earn science or engineering doctorates end up in the sort of academic positions that directly use what they were trained for.
Others, ending up in industry, business or other professions, do interesting work and earn lucrative salaries and can contribute enormously to society. But by the time many give up on academia — four to six years or more for a Ph.D., a decade or more as a postdoc, they are edging toward middle age, having spent their youth in temporary low-paying positions getting highly specialized training they do not need.
Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure.
Every year the market grows tighter, and federal money for research grants, which support most of this research, remains flat. The journey of Dr. Charpentier, says Alexander Ommaya, acting chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, is not so unusual. “It happens,” he said. Job opportunities, he says, “are limited.”
But wait. Don’t we need more trained scientists — the people whose research can lead to new knowledge, new products, new cures for disease? Aren’t some companies importing STEM workers? (...)
“It used to be that the majority who got a Ph.D. in the biological sciences would go into an academic career,” said Dr. Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health. “Now,” he says, “that is very much the minority.”
Many spend years in a holding pattern as postdocs, which are temporary positions, working for a professor and being paid from the professor’s research grant. The average pay in 2016 for a beginning postdoc in the biomedical sciences is around $44,000, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, has not changed since 1998.
Why would any smart person work for so little? The goal for postdocs is to get grants of their own eventually, but the success rate for those applying has plunged.
In 2000, 32 percent of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health resulted in an award. Now it is just 18 percent. And the average age at which the lucky few actually get a grant has steadily increased — it is now 42, up from 35 in 1980, which means biomedical scientists in academia are essentially apprentices until middle age. And the tendency is for the grants to go to scientists who already have them, making it harder and harder to break into the system.
by Gina Kolata, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
The Fashion Industry Seems Detached From the World Around It. Can It Reconnect?
On the first day of this city’s celebration of spring 2017 menswear, the designers of Duckie Brown were fixated on a photograph of an elegantly dressed young woman taken 1,300 miles away.
In their downtown studio, Daniel Silver and Steven Cox were hunched over a tiny cellphone image of Ieshia Evans, the woman in the fluttering sundress whose steely posture was unbowed as she stood between Baton Rouge police officers armed with riot gear and angry protesters decrying the death of Alton Sterling.
No simple pair of chinos on a beanpole hipster could compete.
At the menswear industry’s opening-night party, waiters passed picture-perfect hors d’oeuvres and bartenders poured booze. Common was on the bill. Cadillac sponsored it all.
The party conversation, half-heard over the fashionable din, was about which shows might be good — and which might be a bore. Folks nodded and smiled even if they heard only one-third of what was said. It didn’t matter; just small talk after all.
But then the topic changed. Dallas. They leaned in close — heads almost touching, don’t want to miss a word — when the fashion director of Neiman Marcus began to talk about the mood back in the gleaming Texas city where the company is based: Why here? Why did the shooter target our police?
Fashion — as an industry — feels disconnected from today’s news. Like some oblivious bystander. The industry en masse seems diffident. The power of its collective voice goes unused in matters of social justice, national turmoil, political pandemonium.
Instead, Seventh Avenue is busy bemoaning its own internal upheaval. Should it show you the spring 2017 collection now? Or wait until, say, April? Should it even call these collections “spring” or, simply, “new clothes”?
Fashion burrows on. Its creativity may stir dreams. But will it awaken the mind? A single draped navy blazer from Duckie Brown can deliver a dissertation’s worth of detail about gender. The crispness of a cantaloupe-colored sailing coat from Exley is a history lesson in New England manufacturing.
But mostly, fashion has just been peacocking. Suit Supply peddles tight little suits on hyper-groomed dandies. Uri Minkoff mixes tailoring with performance fabric to offer up short shorts that strain to their limit on the muscular thighs of dancers.
In their downtown studio, Daniel Silver and Steven Cox were hunched over a tiny cellphone image of Ieshia Evans, the woman in the fluttering sundress whose steely posture was unbowed as she stood between Baton Rouge police officers armed with riot gear and angry protesters decrying the death of Alton Sterling.
No simple pair of chinos on a beanpole hipster could compete.At the menswear industry’s opening-night party, waiters passed picture-perfect hors d’oeuvres and bartenders poured booze. Common was on the bill. Cadillac sponsored it all.
The party conversation, half-heard over the fashionable din, was about which shows might be good — and which might be a bore. Folks nodded and smiled even if they heard only one-third of what was said. It didn’t matter; just small talk after all.
But then the topic changed. Dallas. They leaned in close — heads almost touching, don’t want to miss a word — when the fashion director of Neiman Marcus began to talk about the mood back in the gleaming Texas city where the company is based: Why here? Why did the shooter target our police?
Fashion — as an industry — feels disconnected from today’s news. Like some oblivious bystander. The industry en masse seems diffident. The power of its collective voice goes unused in matters of social justice, national turmoil, political pandemonium.
Instead, Seventh Avenue is busy bemoaning its own internal upheaval. Should it show you the spring 2017 collection now? Or wait until, say, April? Should it even call these collections “spring” or, simply, “new clothes”?
Fashion burrows on. Its creativity may stir dreams. But will it awaken the mind? A single draped navy blazer from Duckie Brown can deliver a dissertation’s worth of detail about gender. The crispness of a cantaloupe-colored sailing coat from Exley is a history lesson in New England manufacturing.
But mostly, fashion has just been peacocking. Suit Supply peddles tight little suits on hyper-groomed dandies. Uri Minkoff mixes tailoring with performance fabric to offer up short shorts that strain to their limit on the muscular thighs of dancers.
It might do the menswear industry a bit of good to go cold turkey on hiring so many lumberjack-bearded models who are tattooed up like “The Illustrated Man.” It would serve designers well to consider how a brocade suit or a palm frond hat might look on just a regular guy. (Probably not so great.) After all, exactly what percentage of male consumers is made up of the hipster demographic?
Menswear has spent a significant amount of runway time touting the glories of gender-neutral clothing, feminized men’s clothes and masculine clothes that are welcoming to women. But even in the fashion crowd there is little evidence that this style has made the leap from the runway to the audience. Perhaps it’s yet to come. Or perhaps fashion is off the mark, just burrowing in deeper.
by Robin Givhan, WP | Read more:
Image: Robin Givhan
Menswear has spent a significant amount of runway time touting the glories of gender-neutral clothing, feminized men’s clothes and masculine clothes that are welcoming to women. But even in the fashion crowd there is little evidence that this style has made the leap from the runway to the audience. Perhaps it’s yet to come. Or perhaps fashion is off the mark, just burrowing in deeper.
by Robin Givhan, WP | Read more:
Image: Robin Givhan
Why Retail Has a Growing Reverse Supply Chain Problem—And How to Fix It
Over the years, retailers have become very good at the supply chain—the process of getting goods from the manufacturing plant to the customer. But today, many retailers face a different challenge: taking those goods back, a process referred to as the "reverse supply chain."
Every year, 2 million tons (or 4 billion pounds) of retail returns are loaded into landfills, according to Environmental Capital Group, many of which are already brimming to capacity and contributing to environmental problems like groundwater contamination and greenhouse gas emissions.
Many retailers expect the problem and cost of retail returns to grow, thanks to the rise of e-commerce and more retailers offering free shipping and free returns. A recent study from eMarketer forecasted e-commerce sales in the U.S. will grow 15.6% in 2016, with e-commerce’s share of total retail sales poised to surpass 10% by 2018. Large retailers from Macy’s to Target and Wal-Mart have vowed to grow their omnichannel and e-commerce capabilities, offering new options to customers in order to compete with Amazon.
As retailers ramp up their offerings to keep up with changing consumer expectations and shopping habits, experts say the industry must place a greater emphasis on the reverse supply chain. With the changing tide, retailers are finding they must be equipped to process returns from multiple channels in an efficient manner: an investment that makes environmental andbusiness sense, albeit one they have not traditionally focused on.
by Kelsey Lindsey, Retail Dive | Read more:
Image: Fotolia
Every year, 2 million tons (or 4 billion pounds) of retail returns are loaded into landfills, according to Environmental Capital Group, many of which are already brimming to capacity and contributing to environmental problems like groundwater contamination and greenhouse gas emissions.Many retailers expect the problem and cost of retail returns to grow, thanks to the rise of e-commerce and more retailers offering free shipping and free returns. A recent study from eMarketer forecasted e-commerce sales in the U.S. will grow 15.6% in 2016, with e-commerce’s share of total retail sales poised to surpass 10% by 2018. Large retailers from Macy’s to Target and Wal-Mart have vowed to grow their omnichannel and e-commerce capabilities, offering new options to customers in order to compete with Amazon.
As retailers ramp up their offerings to keep up with changing consumer expectations and shopping habits, experts say the industry must place a greater emphasis on the reverse supply chain. With the changing tide, retailers are finding they must be equipped to process returns from multiple channels in an efficient manner: an investment that makes environmental andbusiness sense, albeit one they have not traditionally focused on.
The forward supply chain's ugly stepsister
The reverse supply chain has historically been regarded as the forward supply chain's ugly stepsister, an unmanageable “nuisance” that siphoned away costs, according to Jonathan Byrnes, senior lecturer at MIT’s Center for Transportation & Logistics. But eventually, retailers couldn’t ignore lost profits.
As the costs stemming from a lax reverse supply chain hurt their margins,larger retailers began focusing in on it about 15-20 years ago. In 2016, it's becoming increasingly urgent.
“Today, retailers have serious margin problems, especially from omnichannel competitors,” Byrnes said. “So, they are looking under every rock,” including the reverse supply chain.
Part of the problem is that the process for returns hasn't changed much over the years. Many returns to stores were and still are treated more or less in the same way, according to Ann Calamai, director of sustainability for logistics technology company Optoro.
Once an item—let’s say a toaster—is returned, it is then kept at the store until the weekly arrival of a truck that transports the toaster and other returns to a central facility. At the warehouse, piles of unwanted merchandise are relegated to a corner to be dealt with—maybe in a week, maybe in a month. Retailers can choose to refurbish the toaster and resell it, recycle it for parts, sell it to a liquidator, or dispose of it right there.
“What we're seeing in that reverse supply chain is a lot of touches: The liquidator sells to other liquidator who sells to wholesaler and wholesaler has a flea market or it's an eBay shop—regular ol’ folks reselling merchandise,” Calamai said.
But if the goods do end up in the landfill, they will most likely stick around for years and years. Rubber boot soles take about 50-80 years to decompose in landfills; leather shoes, 25-40 years; wool clothing, one to five years. With the number of returns likely to grow each year, the number of rubber boot soles and leather shoes festering away in landfills for decades will likely only increase.
“It’s unsustainable to constantly take natural resources and produce a product that’s eventually going to be thrown away. Summarily, it’s unsustainable to run a business not making money and not growing," said Adam Siegel, vice president for sustainability and retail operations at the Retail Industry Leaders Association. "So sustainability, to me, goes hand-in-hand with business environmental opportunities.”
The reverse supply chain has historically been regarded as the forward supply chain's ugly stepsister, an unmanageable “nuisance” that siphoned away costs, according to Jonathan Byrnes, senior lecturer at MIT’s Center for Transportation & Logistics. But eventually, retailers couldn’t ignore lost profits.
As the costs stemming from a lax reverse supply chain hurt their margins,larger retailers began focusing in on it about 15-20 years ago. In 2016, it's becoming increasingly urgent.
“Today, retailers have serious margin problems, especially from omnichannel competitors,” Byrnes said. “So, they are looking under every rock,” including the reverse supply chain.
Part of the problem is that the process for returns hasn't changed much over the years. Many returns to stores were and still are treated more or less in the same way, according to Ann Calamai, director of sustainability for logistics technology company Optoro.
Once an item—let’s say a toaster—is returned, it is then kept at the store until the weekly arrival of a truck that transports the toaster and other returns to a central facility. At the warehouse, piles of unwanted merchandise are relegated to a corner to be dealt with—maybe in a week, maybe in a month. Retailers can choose to refurbish the toaster and resell it, recycle it for parts, sell it to a liquidator, or dispose of it right there.
“What we're seeing in that reverse supply chain is a lot of touches: The liquidator sells to other liquidator who sells to wholesaler and wholesaler has a flea market or it's an eBay shop—regular ol’ folks reselling merchandise,” Calamai said.
But if the goods do end up in the landfill, they will most likely stick around for years and years. Rubber boot soles take about 50-80 years to decompose in landfills; leather shoes, 25-40 years; wool clothing, one to five years. With the number of returns likely to grow each year, the number of rubber boot soles and leather shoes festering away in landfills for decades will likely only increase.
“It’s unsustainable to constantly take natural resources and produce a product that’s eventually going to be thrown away. Summarily, it’s unsustainable to run a business not making money and not growing," said Adam Siegel, vice president for sustainability and retail operations at the Retail Industry Leaders Association. "So sustainability, to me, goes hand-in-hand with business environmental opportunities.”
by Kelsey Lindsey, Retail Dive | Read more:
Image: Fotolia
Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality
[ed. Well. An instant, massive, world-wide cultural phenomenon. In one week. You don't see that too often. See also: Pokémon Go: Why You Should Play. I still find the whole thing more disquieting than frivolous. Reality gets elbowed further back into the bus (and Nintento gains $7 billion in valuation overnight). Pretty soon we won't be able to tell what worlds people are inhabiting, with even less of an incentive to interact. See also: Headphones Everywhere.]
It started as an April Fool’s joke. Google released a funny video that mashed up Google Maps and Pokémon. The video, released on April 1, 2014, went viral, drawing more than eighteen million views in all. “We thought, Why not try and make it real?” John Hanke said. Hanke is the C.E.O. of Niantic, which was then a project inside Google, developing mobile games using augmented and mixed-media reality.
Two years later, Hanke and his team have turned that joke into a reality. On July 6th, Niantic, which had since spun off from Google to become an independent company, released Pokémon Go—a game that encourages you to get out in the real world and use your mobile phone to catch Pokémon. (Pokémon, if you need a primer, are collectible creatures that players use to battle one another. They were first brought to gaming consoles by Nintendo in 1996, and in the early two-thousands they also populated an animated cartoon and stacks of playing cards that were ubiquitous among preteens.) Within two days of its release, Pokémon Go had been installed on 5.16 per cent of Android phones in the United States. In less than a week it has become the most downloaded app of the moment in Apple’s App Store and has started sucking time from our days—forty-three minutes on average, according to SimilarWeb, more than Snapchat and Facebook. It has taken over Twitter, caused roving bands of nostalgic obsessives to convene on public spaces, and created discontent in relationships. To say it has spread like wildfire is to exaggerate the power of wildfires.
For a moment, however, put aside the sudden revival of our interest in Pokémon and consider what this spurt tells us about the future of software and the nature of reality—and how they integrate into what we think of as entertainment.
Augmented reality is the “boy who cried wolf” of the post-Internet world—it’s long been promised but has rarely been delivered in a satisfying way. Augmented reality refers to a view of the real-world environment whose elements are overlaid (or augmented) with computer-generated images and sound. (It differs from virtual reality, where the real world is replaced by complete immersion in a computer-generated space.) (...)
Pokémon Go, which involves trying to “catch” Pikachu or Squirtle or other creatures with your smartphone, is an inherently social experience. You need to be walking around—on the streets, in public places—to catch the Pokémon. Open the app and, pretty much wherever you are, you could be alerted that there is a Pokémon in the vicinity. The other day, I had some time to spare at the San Francisco airport, so I started looking. An animated version of Google Maps popped up on my screen, along with indications that there might be Pokémon around. The more you move around, the more creatures you find. I found only one, but I got a good workout. More important, the game made me happy; it had served a real function.
The technology to make this happen is something we haven’t seen applied before in gaming. Whereas a typical massively multiplayer online game is decentralized among different servers and players, Niantic wanted to create a single source for its game. This requires extraordinary computing power and a fundamental rethinking of how gaming software is written. If a system is fragmented, all users might not be getting new information at the exact same time. Financial-trading systems also run on a single source, because everyone needs to know the correct price of a stock at the same time. “Since everything is changing constantly, this is more like a real-time financial system,” Hanke said, pointing out that the usage on Niantic’s system was “a lot, even by Google standards.”
Hanke has long been interested in mapping and the interplay of our physical and digital worlds. He was the founder of Keyhole, a startup that was acquired by Google and renamed Google Earth. During our conversation, he pointed out that Google Earth was made possible by a convergence of digital photography, broadband networks, mapping, and the small near-Earth satellites that emerged around that time. Augmented reality, he said, is on a similar track—powerful smartphones, faster and more robust networks, a new generation of computer infrastructure, and data collection are all converging.
For those who have been believers in augmented reality, these are exciting times. Riku Suomela joined Nokia Research in 1999 and started playing around with head-mounted displays to experiment with augmented reality. It was clear to Suomela that it would be a while before the technology went mainstream. “I have been thinking Pokémon Go could be the product that creates the market for augmented- and mixed-reality gaming, and I am optimistic this is happening now,” Suomela—who has since started a new company, Lume Games, which competes with Niantic—said. Ville Vesterinen, the co-founder of Grey Area, said in an e-mail that “now is an ideal time” for work on “location-based games (you can call them AR if you like).” He pointed out that the number of people with mobile devices has grown considerably since his company released Shadow Cities.
For the past few days, I have been playing Pokémon Go and thinking about what it means. This weekend I went to the recently opened San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and wanted to know everything about the art and various installations, beyond what was posted on the walls. I felt as if I should be able to lift my phone and get more details on the process of the creation of the art work, rather than having to type a search term into my browser. Pokémon Go had changed my expectations on how to access information. That shift in expectation, perhaps, is the game’s true importance.
It started as an April Fool’s joke. Google released a funny video that mashed up Google Maps and Pokémon. The video, released on April 1, 2014, went viral, drawing more than eighteen million views in all. “We thought, Why not try and make it real?” John Hanke said. Hanke is the C.E.O. of Niantic, which was then a project inside Google, developing mobile games using augmented and mixed-media reality.
Two years later, Hanke and his team have turned that joke into a reality. On July 6th, Niantic, which had since spun off from Google to become an independent company, released Pokémon Go—a game that encourages you to get out in the real world and use your mobile phone to catch Pokémon. (Pokémon, if you need a primer, are collectible creatures that players use to battle one another. They were first brought to gaming consoles by Nintendo in 1996, and in the early two-thousands they also populated an animated cartoon and stacks of playing cards that were ubiquitous among preteens.) Within two days of its release, Pokémon Go had been installed on 5.16 per cent of Android phones in the United States. In less than a week it has become the most downloaded app of the moment in Apple’s App Store and has started sucking time from our days—forty-three minutes on average, according to SimilarWeb, more than Snapchat and Facebook. It has taken over Twitter, caused roving bands of nostalgic obsessives to convene on public spaces, and created discontent in relationships. To say it has spread like wildfire is to exaggerate the power of wildfires.For a moment, however, put aside the sudden revival of our interest in Pokémon and consider what this spurt tells us about the future of software and the nature of reality—and how they integrate into what we think of as entertainment.
Augmented reality is the “boy who cried wolf” of the post-Internet world—it’s long been promised but has rarely been delivered in a satisfying way. Augmented reality refers to a view of the real-world environment whose elements are overlaid (or augmented) with computer-generated images and sound. (It differs from virtual reality, where the real world is replaced by complete immersion in a computer-generated space.) (...)
Pokémon Go, which involves trying to “catch” Pikachu or Squirtle or other creatures with your smartphone, is an inherently social experience. You need to be walking around—on the streets, in public places—to catch the Pokémon. Open the app and, pretty much wherever you are, you could be alerted that there is a Pokémon in the vicinity. The other day, I had some time to spare at the San Francisco airport, so I started looking. An animated version of Google Maps popped up on my screen, along with indications that there might be Pokémon around. The more you move around, the more creatures you find. I found only one, but I got a good workout. More important, the game made me happy; it had served a real function.
The technology to make this happen is something we haven’t seen applied before in gaming. Whereas a typical massively multiplayer online game is decentralized among different servers and players, Niantic wanted to create a single source for its game. This requires extraordinary computing power and a fundamental rethinking of how gaming software is written. If a system is fragmented, all users might not be getting new information at the exact same time. Financial-trading systems also run on a single source, because everyone needs to know the correct price of a stock at the same time. “Since everything is changing constantly, this is more like a real-time financial system,” Hanke said, pointing out that the usage on Niantic’s system was “a lot, even by Google standards.”
Hanke has long been interested in mapping and the interplay of our physical and digital worlds. He was the founder of Keyhole, a startup that was acquired by Google and renamed Google Earth. During our conversation, he pointed out that Google Earth was made possible by a convergence of digital photography, broadband networks, mapping, and the small near-Earth satellites that emerged around that time. Augmented reality, he said, is on a similar track—powerful smartphones, faster and more robust networks, a new generation of computer infrastructure, and data collection are all converging.
For those who have been believers in augmented reality, these are exciting times. Riku Suomela joined Nokia Research in 1999 and started playing around with head-mounted displays to experiment with augmented reality. It was clear to Suomela that it would be a while before the technology went mainstream. “I have been thinking Pokémon Go could be the product that creates the market for augmented- and mixed-reality gaming, and I am optimistic this is happening now,” Suomela—who has since started a new company, Lume Games, which competes with Niantic—said. Ville Vesterinen, the co-founder of Grey Area, said in an e-mail that “now is an ideal time” for work on “location-based games (you can call them AR if you like).” He pointed out that the number of people with mobile devices has grown considerably since his company released Shadow Cities.
For the past few days, I have been playing Pokémon Go and thinking about what it means. This weekend I went to the recently opened San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and wanted to know everything about the art and various installations, beyond what was posted on the walls. I felt as if I should be able to lift my phone and get more details on the process of the creation of the art work, rather than having to type a search term into my browser. Pokémon Go had changed my expectations on how to access information. That shift in expectation, perhaps, is the game’s true importance.
by Om Malik, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Chris Helgren/Magnum
Robert Moran
via:
[ed. Interesting how technology integrated all four functions into one device and killed the beauty of component design in the process.]
How Technology Disrupted the Truth
Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.
Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). (...)
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.
Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an “information cascade”. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, “people forward on what others think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete, because they think they have learned something valuable.” This cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a friend’s post on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you’re “in the know”, and thus you increase the visibility of their post to others.
Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term “filter bubble” in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web – and in particular Google’s personalised search function, which means that no two people’s Google searches are the same – means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared.
Pariser’s plea, at the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure that “their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most self-validating”. But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:
Facebook, which launched only in 2004, now has 1.6bn users worldwide. It has become the dominant way for people to find news on the internet – and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the newspaper era. As Emily Bell has written: “Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security.”
Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University – and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian – has outlined the seismic impact of social media for journalism. “Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years,” she wrote in March, “than perhaps at any time in the past 500.” The future of publishing is being put into the “hands of the few, who now control the destiny of the many”. News publishers have lost control over the distribution of their journalism, which for many readers is now “filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable”. This means that social media companies have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read – and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other people’s work. As Bell notes: “There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there has ever been in the past.”
Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a stream of information chosen by friends, contacts and family, processed by secret algorithms. The old idea of a wide-open web – where hyperlinks from site to site created a non-hierarchical and decentralised network of information – has been largely supplanted by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which (such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not allow outward links at all.
Many people, in fact, especially teenagers, now spend more and more of their time on closed chat apps, which allow users to create groups to share messages privately –perhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social spaces. But the closed space of a chat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or other social networks.
As the pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his online activity, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year, the “diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned” has given way to “the centralisation of information” inside a select few social networks – and the end result is “making us all less powerful in relation to government and corporations”.
Of course, Facebook does not decide what you read – at least not in the traditional sense of making decisions – and nor does it dictate what news organisations produce. But when one platform becomes the dominant source for accessing information, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium. (The most visible evidence of Facebook’s influence on journalism is the panic that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithm that threatens to reduce the page views sent to publishers.)
In the last few years, many news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or investment) – but like junk food, you hate yourself when you’ve gorged on it. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has been the creation of fake news farms, which attract traffic with false reports that are designed to look like real news, and are therefore widely shared on social networks. But the same principle applies to news that is misleading or sensationally dishonest, even if it wasn’t created to deceive: the new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality.
by Katharine Viner, The Guardian | Read more:
Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). (...)In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.
Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an “information cascade”. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, “people forward on what others think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete, because they think they have learned something valuable.” This cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a friend’s post on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you’re “in the know”, and thus you increase the visibility of their post to others.
Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term “filter bubble” in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web – and in particular Google’s personalised search function, which means that no two people’s Google searches are the same – means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared.
Pariser’s plea, at the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure that “their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most self-validating”. But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:
I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory, but the filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook’s custom search that I can’t find anyone who is happy *despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today* and despite the fact that I’m *actively* looking to hear what they are saying.
This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of our societies … We’re getting countries where one half just doesn’t know anything at all about the other.But asking technology companies to “do something” about the filter bubble presumes that this is a problem that can be easily fixed – rather than one baked into the very idea of social networks that are designed to give you what you and your friends want to see.
Facebook, which launched only in 2004, now has 1.6bn users worldwide. It has become the dominant way for people to find news on the internet – and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the newspaper era. As Emily Bell has written: “Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security.”
Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University – and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian – has outlined the seismic impact of social media for journalism. “Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years,” she wrote in March, “than perhaps at any time in the past 500.” The future of publishing is being put into the “hands of the few, who now control the destiny of the many”. News publishers have lost control over the distribution of their journalism, which for many readers is now “filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable”. This means that social media companies have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read – and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other people’s work. As Bell notes: “There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there has ever been in the past.”
Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a stream of information chosen by friends, contacts and family, processed by secret algorithms. The old idea of a wide-open web – where hyperlinks from site to site created a non-hierarchical and decentralised network of information – has been largely supplanted by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which (such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not allow outward links at all.
Many people, in fact, especially teenagers, now spend more and more of their time on closed chat apps, which allow users to create groups to share messages privately –perhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social spaces. But the closed space of a chat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or other social networks.
As the pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his online activity, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year, the “diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned” has given way to “the centralisation of information” inside a select few social networks – and the end result is “making us all less powerful in relation to government and corporations”.
Of course, Facebook does not decide what you read – at least not in the traditional sense of making decisions – and nor does it dictate what news organisations produce. But when one platform becomes the dominant source for accessing information, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium. (The most visible evidence of Facebook’s influence on journalism is the panic that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithm that threatens to reduce the page views sent to publishers.)
In the last few years, many news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or investment) – but like junk food, you hate yourself when you’ve gorged on it. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has been the creation of fake news farms, which attract traffic with false reports that are designed to look like real news, and are therefore widely shared on social networks. But the same principle applies to news that is misleading or sensationally dishonest, even if it wasn’t created to deceive: the new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality.
by Katharine Viner, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: : Sébastien Thibault
The Space Station Is Becoming A Spy Satellite For Wildlife
In 1250, the prior of a Cistercian Abbey reputedly tied a note to a leg of a barn swallow, which read: “Oh swallow, where do you live in winter?” The next spring, he got a response: “In Asia, in the home of Petrus.”
This perhaps apocryphal story marks one of the first known instances of someone tagging an animal to track its movements. Thanks to many such endeavors, we now know that every year, barn swallows migrate between their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere to wintering grounds throughout the tropics and the south. In 1912, one intrepid individual that was ringed in England turned up 7,500 miles away in South Africa.
But swallows are the exception rather than the rule. The journeys of most migratory animals, especially smaller species, are a mystery. Flocks, herds, and shoals are constantly crisscrossing the globe, but despite the intense surveillance of our planet, we often have no idea what paths they take. “They leave in one place and we don’t know what happens to them until they show up in another place,” says Meg Crofoot from the University of California, Davis.
This ignorance makes it hard to save threatened species: what works in one part of the world may be completely undone as animals travel to another. It also jeopardizes our own health. Where are the birds that harbor avian flu? Where do the bats that carry Ebola go? What about the red-billed quelea, a small finch that flocks in millions and devours crops with locust-like voraciousness?
Since the 1960s, scientists have tried to answer questions like these by tagging animals with radio transmitters. At first, they followed the signals with clunky hand-held antennae; later, they loaded receivers onto satellites, allowing them to track animals over long distances and rough terrain. But even after decades of innovation, satellite telemetry tags are still expensive, slow, and clunky. The smallest weighs around 10 grams and would overburden any animal lighter than 240 grams. That rules out three quarters of birds and mammals. There are much lighter data-loggers around but they’re light because they don’t transmit any data—so you have to recapture whatever animal you’ve tagged to find out where it has been.
Frustrated by these limitations, Martin Wiselski at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology devised the ICARUS Initiative (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space). His team has developed extremely light radio tags that can be fitted to even tiny animals, and they’re sending a dedicated receiver to the International Space Station next summer. Once it’s up, it will be able to map the whereabouts of hundreds, if not thousands of birds, bats, and other travelers, in real-time. “It will be the best ever possible sensing network of life on the planet,” says Wiselski.
He came up with the idea while talking to astronomer George Swenson, who helped to pioneer the use of radio telemetry for tracking wildlife, and who also helped to construct the radio telescope known as the Very Large Array. “We were sitting on some stairs in Panama, having beer, and looking over the canal,” says Wiselski. “I said there must be a way to receive these small transmitters from all over the globe. George said this is what we do all the time—build telescopes to look at small radio sources. We look up into the sky. You need to look at the ground.”
Still, Swenson predicted that it would take 15 years to get the system up and running. Wiselski told him he was being ridiculous. That was 15 years ago. (The Icarus myth, after all, is more about hubris than flight.) Getting funding was the hardest part. “We went to NASA,” says Wiselski. “They thought the project so unlikely that it was set in the same category as the space elevator.” (...)
Eager researchers are already lining up to use the tags. To begin with, between 40 and 50 teams will use ICARUS to study birds, bats, sea turtles, and more. All the data from this work will eventually be uploaded to MoveBank, a free online database for animal tracking studies. “It’s a big data project for life on the planet,” says Wiselski. (...)
By tracking animals, researchers may also be able to discover the secret pathways and hiding places of viruses and other pathogens. Consider Ebola: the identity and location of its wild reservoirs are still hotly debated, although it seems that certain bat species can harbor it. “We can take a blood sample and check if they have Ebola, put tags on them, let them go, recapture them and take another sample,” says Wiselski. “We can then say that bats that have been through this part of the Congo have seen Ebola.”
Beyond charting the movements of animals, Wiselski thinks that ICARUS could be a deterrent to those who would stop animals from moving altogether. If wildlife managers start tagging elephant ears or rhino horns, it might deter poachers from killing the animals and transporting their body parts, lest they in turn be tracked by overhead satellites. “We have request from people in Mongolia, because people are stealing the bones from the dinosaurs,” adds Wiselski.
This perhaps apocryphal story marks one of the first known instances of someone tagging an animal to track its movements. Thanks to many such endeavors, we now know that every year, barn swallows migrate between their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere to wintering grounds throughout the tropics and the south. In 1912, one intrepid individual that was ringed in England turned up 7,500 miles away in South Africa.
But swallows are the exception rather than the rule. The journeys of most migratory animals, especially smaller species, are a mystery. Flocks, herds, and shoals are constantly crisscrossing the globe, but despite the intense surveillance of our planet, we often have no idea what paths they take. “They leave in one place and we don’t know what happens to them until they show up in another place,” says Meg Crofoot from the University of California, Davis.This ignorance makes it hard to save threatened species: what works in one part of the world may be completely undone as animals travel to another. It also jeopardizes our own health. Where are the birds that harbor avian flu? Where do the bats that carry Ebola go? What about the red-billed quelea, a small finch that flocks in millions and devours crops with locust-like voraciousness?
Since the 1960s, scientists have tried to answer questions like these by tagging animals with radio transmitters. At first, they followed the signals with clunky hand-held antennae; later, they loaded receivers onto satellites, allowing them to track animals over long distances and rough terrain. But even after decades of innovation, satellite telemetry tags are still expensive, slow, and clunky. The smallest weighs around 10 grams and would overburden any animal lighter than 240 grams. That rules out three quarters of birds and mammals. There are much lighter data-loggers around but they’re light because they don’t transmit any data—so you have to recapture whatever animal you’ve tagged to find out where it has been.
Frustrated by these limitations, Martin Wiselski at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology devised the ICARUS Initiative (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space). His team has developed extremely light radio tags that can be fitted to even tiny animals, and they’re sending a dedicated receiver to the International Space Station next summer. Once it’s up, it will be able to map the whereabouts of hundreds, if not thousands of birds, bats, and other travelers, in real-time. “It will be the best ever possible sensing network of life on the planet,” says Wiselski.
He came up with the idea while talking to astronomer George Swenson, who helped to pioneer the use of radio telemetry for tracking wildlife, and who also helped to construct the radio telescope known as the Very Large Array. “We were sitting on some stairs in Panama, having beer, and looking over the canal,” says Wiselski. “I said there must be a way to receive these small transmitters from all over the globe. George said this is what we do all the time—build telescopes to look at small radio sources. We look up into the sky. You need to look at the ground.”
Still, Swenson predicted that it would take 15 years to get the system up and running. Wiselski told him he was being ridiculous. That was 15 years ago. (The Icarus myth, after all, is more about hubris than flight.) Getting funding was the hardest part. “We went to NASA,” says Wiselski. “They thought the project so unlikely that it was set in the same category as the space elevator.” (...)
Eager researchers are already lining up to use the tags. To begin with, between 40 and 50 teams will use ICARUS to study birds, bats, sea turtles, and more. All the data from this work will eventually be uploaded to MoveBank, a free online database for animal tracking studies. “It’s a big data project for life on the planet,” says Wiselski. (...)
By tracking animals, researchers may also be able to discover the secret pathways and hiding places of viruses and other pathogens. Consider Ebola: the identity and location of its wild reservoirs are still hotly debated, although it seems that certain bat species can harbor it. “We can take a blood sample and check if they have Ebola, put tags on them, let them go, recapture them and take another sample,” says Wiselski. “We can then say that bats that have been through this part of the Congo have seen Ebola.”
Beyond charting the movements of animals, Wiselski thinks that ICARUS could be a deterrent to those who would stop animals from moving altogether. If wildlife managers start tagging elephant ears or rhino horns, it might deter poachers from killing the animals and transporting their body parts, lest they in turn be tracked by overhead satellites. “We have request from people in Mongolia, because people are stealing the bones from the dinosaurs,” adds Wiselski.
by Ed Yong, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Reuters
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