Dazzle Speaks with the Dead

So much to be scared about and so little time to understand—isn’t that what life’s really about... ? And then, just when we start to understand a tiny bit of it? We’re suddenly dragged off to some other meaningless form of nonexistence altogether.”

Dazzle was neither a mystical nor a metaphysical sort of dog. He didn’t believe in karma, redemption, the transcendental ego, or the immanence of Platonic forms. For Dazzle, the world was a meaningless and immutable mess—and the byproduct of entirely material insufficiencies. Not enough bones to go around, say. Or people with too many weapons living next door to people without any. So it came as something of a surprise when Dazzle developed, late in life, a gift for speaking with the dead. He had never sought out such a gift, but once it came his way, he lived with it the best that he could.

“I want to tell her that I’m sorry I didn’t clean the bowl more often, or show her enough attention, especially when I was working,” Mr. Lapidus confessed to Dazzle in the sandalwood-scented Comfort-Room of Madame Velma’s Spiritual Contact Center, the longest-functioning spiritual arts shop on the central coast. “I meant to clean it more often, but I never did. And I wish I’d been more affectionate. I don’t know how affectionate I could’ve been with a goldfish, but I should’ve at least made more of an effort. I’m just not the sort of person who develops healthy emotional connections with other creatures, probably because I didn’t know my father when I was little. Other little boys had fathers to play with but I never did.”

Dazzle was accustomed to the weeping, the frantic hand-wringing, and the physical convulsions that manifested human remorse. But if he lived to be a thousand, he would never grow accustomed to the preposterous get-up that Madame Velma insisted he wear each morning while “serving” customers: the multicolored scarves layering his forehead like the turban of some furry Sikh, or the silver-painted bracelets chiming loosely from his neck and ankles, making him feel like a cheap whore at a carnival.

Sitting on a rickety wooden stool behind an even ricketier card table, Dazzle took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and placed his callused paws against the sides of his gloaming, Taiwanese-manufactured crystal ball.

“Shhhh,” Dazzle breathed softly. “Somebody’s trying to speak.”

Mr. Lapidus, wringing his large pale sweaty hands, hunched closer.

“Yes, I’m listening,” Dazzle whispered. “Speak louder, please. Your name’s Fishface and you’re lonely. Your name’s Fishface and you’re trying to find a path into the next world.”

Mr. Lapidus blew his nose into a moppy clump of Kleenex, his eyes round and wide.

“Have you found my beloved Fishface?” he asked. “How did you know her name? What’s she trying to say?”

Dazzle cautioned Mr. Lapidus with his half-lidded eyes.

“Life was hard,” Dazzle confirmed. The spectral presence appeared in Dazzle’s ambient perception like a blip on a sonar screen, a spiny blur of incoherency and loss. “It was cold and round and came up hard from every direction. It yielded nothing but the minimal reflections of yourself.”

Mr. Lapidus stopped crying and sat up straight. He could feel the presence too. Or maybe he could just feel Dazzle feeling it.

“And now all you’re looking for is peace,” Dazzle continued, trying not to look directly at Mr. Lapidus. “You aren’t interested in what this lonely man wants from you. You just want to get as far away from his big, emotionally obsessed moon-face as you can get.”

Since appointing Dazzle her Apprentice-Medium-in-Training, Madame Velma had departed to Club Med with a Dominican leaf-blower named Hymie Sanchez. But not before signing over the DBAs to her financial manager, and opening an online account at the downtown Albertsons, where Dazzle could purchase home-delivered dog food, fresh fruit and vegetables, and an occasional mixed-case of Côtes du Rhône or Beaujolais nouveau—which proved especially useful in helping Dazzle unwind after a long day communing with the cosmos.

“They don’t care one whit about their recently departed,” Madame Velma assured him during their weekly phone conference, her voice suffused with the immanent echoey rush of waves on what Dazzle envisioned as a white, shell-less beach framed by blue sky and bluer water. “They just can’t stand being disobeyed. People develop an unnatural attachment to pets, mainly on account of pets got no say in the matter. Go there, sit here, eat this, sleep on the floor, get in the cage, stop growling—people get what they want from the human-beast dynamic, and that’s extremely satisfying to the sorts of fragile egos that need pets. But when a pet dies, it issues the only independent statement it ever makes, as in: ‘Good riddance, pal! Take your catnip toys and doggy treats and shove ’em straight up your you-know-what!’ It’s like primal disobedience at the cellular level. For pet-lovers, it sends their self-images into a state of shock. Suddenly, their pets have become as indifferent to their happiness as everybody else.”

Since developing an evening regimen of lapping moderately priced wine from a plastic dog bowl, Dazzle had grown about as mellow as he was likely to get.

“I’m cool on the whole over-the-top emotional crisis deal,” he said, kicking back on Madame Velma’s corrugated blue sofa amongst the burbling lava lamps and steadily glimmering Hummels. “I’m even cool with the neediness, the endless litany of personal regret, and the desperate post-midnight pleading for emotional guidance when, jeez, you know me, Velma. I don’t care what happens to human beings—I really don’t. But the part that drives me most crazy is that here I sit, day after day, listening to one homo-sap after another begging me to contact their departed loved ones, and then, when I do make contact? They’re not interested in what their loved ones are trying to say. They just carry on whining about what they’re feeling, and their pain, as if the entire spiritual universe is all about them.”

Unlike Dazzle, who tended to worry too hard about things, Madame Velma was more the carpe-diem type personality. Which was probably why her voice faded away into the distant rush of waves whenever Dazzle’s voice grew most distraught.

“Te amo, mamacita,” a swarthy-sounding Latin voice whispered in the staticky background, as rhythmic and self-sustaining as the tides of St. Tropez. “Te amo all the time.”

But if Dazzle waited long enough, Velma either hung up the phone, or reemerged from what sounded like a long kiss.

“You’ve got a gift, Daz,” Madame Velma would conclude, “whether you like it or not. Me, I was a total charlatan, with all those spooky hidden tape machines and wobbly floorboards hooked to remote controls and so forth. But I know a good soul when I meet one, and one of those good souls happens to be yours. So do what your gift tells you, honey, and always remember the most important part of spiritual-arts services: we take cash, money orders, and American Express, but never Visa. Those Visa pricks keep hitting us with surcharges, and if there’s one thing that pisses off Madame Velma, it’s lining pockets that aren’t hers.”

by Scott Bradfield, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Michael Olivo 

Taj Mahal

Los Angeles, Ca 2014
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Fernwood 2 Night

[ed. I've been trying to find this old series on dvd for years and just stumbled across it this morning on YouTube. Martin Mull and Fred Willard, what a great pairing. Here's a short history of the show and a couple of classics: Nude Dude Ranch and UFO Alien Abduction.]

Why Iceland is the Best Place in the World to be a Woman

[ed. See also (this is exciting!): Iceland election could propel radical Pirate party into power.]

Rebekka is so tiny that, even on her tiptoes, arms aloft, she cannot reach. So her teacher lifts her up to the unvarnished wooden monkey bar. “One, two, three,” her classmates count. She hangs on, determinedly. When she reaches 10, she jumps to the ground. “I am strong,” she shouts proudly.

It’s an ordinary morning for this single-sex class of three-year-olds at Laufásborg nursery school in Reykjavik. No dolls or cup-cake decorating on the lesson plan here. Instead, as Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir, the school’s founder, tells me: “We are training [our girls] to use their voice. We are training them in physical strength. We are training them in courage.”

It’s a fascinating approach to education. And a popular one. In a country of only 330,000 people, there are 19 such primary and nursery schools, empowering girls from an early age.

For the past six years, Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index and looks likely to do so again this week. The Economist recently named Iceland the world’s best place for working women – in comparison, the UK came in at No. 24. Ólafsdóttir’s philosophy seems to sit well with the nation’s progressive accomplishments, but her network of schools has been going for less than 20 years. So, if preschoolers trained in feminism aren’t the reason for this gender success story, what is?

History may provide us with clues. For centuries, this seafaring nation’s women stayed at home as their husbands traversed the oceans. Without men at home, women played the roles of farmer, hunter, architect, builder. They managed household finances and were crucial to the country’s ability to prosper.

By 1975, Icelandic women were fed up. It wasn’t just that they weren’t being properly paid for their labour, they also were sick of their lack of political representation: only nine women had ever won seats in parliament. So, against the backdrop of the global feminist movement, Iceland’s women decided to take things into their own hands.

An outpouring of women on to the streets was, by then, a well-trodden form of activism. In 1970, tens of thousands of women had protested on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. In the UK, that same year, 20,000 women marched in Leeds against discriminatory wages. But what made Iceland’s day of protest on 24 October 1975 so effective was the number of women who participated. It was not just the impact of 25,000 women – which, at the time, was a fifth of the female population – that gathered on the streets of Reykjavik, but the 90% of Iceland’s female population who went on all-out professional and domestic strike. Teachers, nurses, office workers, housewives put down tools and didn’t go to work, provide childcare or even cook in their kitchens. All to prove how indispensable they were.

Thordis Loa Thorhallsdottir, CEO of a tourism company, was on the streets that day: “I was 10 at the time, and I remember it very clearly, standing there with my mother, fighting. I can still feel the crowd and the power that was there. The big message was that if women don’t work, the whole community is paralysed – the whole society.”

Grassroots activism at such a scale unsurprisingly had a significant material impact. Within five years, the country had the world’s first democratically elected female president – Vigdis Finnbogadottir. Now in her 80s, this steely-eyed powerhouse tells me of the impact that day of protest had on her own career trajectory.

“I would never have been elected in 1980 if it hadn’t been for the women’s day of action … because when my predecessor announced that he was not going to stand again, the voices were immediately heard: now we have to have a woman among the candidates.”

Other landmarks soon followed. An all-female political party – the Women’s Alliance – was established. More women were elected to parliament; by 1999, more than a third of MPs were women.

And then, in 2000, parental leave legislation came into effect: which every person I spoke to highlighted this moment as key to Iceland’s march to the top of the gender-equality table. Today, every parent receives three months’ paid leave that is non-transferable. Parents then have an additional three months to share as they like.

Because the pay is significant – 80% of salary up to a ceiling of £2,300 a month – and because it’s on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, 90% of Icelandic fathers take up their paternal leave. This piece of social engineering has had a profound impact on men as well as women. Not only do women return to work after giving birth faster than before, they return to their pre-childbirth working hours faster, too. Research shows that, after taking the three months’ leave, fathers continue to be significantly more involved in childcare and do more housework. Sharing the parental responsibilities and chores from the beginning, it seems, makes a difference.

“It’s a good place to be a woman,” says Thorhallsdottir. And it is. Almost 80% of Icelandic women work. Thanks to mandatory quotas, almost half of board members of listed companies are now women, while 65% of Iceland’s university students and 41% of MPs are female.

by Noreena Hertz, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Nicholas Rhodes/Corbis via Getty Images

How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul

[ed. See also: Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt]

It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of corruption and dirty politics the Nixon White House had wrought. Richard Nixon himself had resigned just a few months earlier in August. But the Watergate Babies didn’t just campaign against Nixon; they took on the Democratic establishment, too. Newly elected Representative George Miller of California, then just 29 years old, announced, “We came here to take the Bastille.”

One of their first targets was an old man from Texarkana: a former cotton tenant farmer named Wright Patman who had served in Congress since 1929. He was also the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency and had been for more than a decade. Antiwar liberal reformers realized that the key to power in Congress was through the committee system; being the chairman of a powerful committee meant having control over the flow of legislation. The problem was: Chairmen were selected based on their length of service. So liberal reformers already in office, buttressed by the Watergate Babies’ votes, demanded that the committee chairmen be picked by a full Democratic-caucus vote instead.

Ironically, as chairman of the Banking Committee, Patman had been the first Democrat to investigate the Watergate scandal. But he was vulnerable to the new crowd he had helped usher in. He was old; they were young. He had supported segregation in the past and the war in Vietnam; they were vehemently against both. Patman had never gone to college and had been a crusading economic populist during the Great Depression; the Watergate Babies were weaned on campus politics, television, and affluence.

What’s more, the new members were antiwar, not necessarily anti-bank. “Our generation did not know the Depression,” then-Representative Paul Tsongas said. “The populism of the 1930s doesn’t really apply to the 1970s,” argued Pete Stark, a new California member who launched his political career by affixing a giant peace sign onto the roof of the bank he owned.

In reality, while the Watergate Babies provided the numbers needed to eject him, it was actually Patman’s Banking Committee colleagues who orchestrated his ouster. For more than a decade, Patman had represented a Democratic political tradition stretching back to Thomas Jefferson, an alliance of the agrarian South and the West against Northeastern capital. For decades, Patman had sought to hold financial power in check, investigating corporate monopolies, high interest rates, the Federal Reserve, and big banks. And the banking allies on the committee had had enough of Patman’s hostility to Wall Street.

Over the years, Patman had upset these members by blocking bank mergers and going after financial power. As famed muckraking columnist Drew Pearson put it: Patman “committed one cardinal sin as chairman. ... He wants to investigate the big bankers.” And so, it was the older bank allies who truly ensured that Patman would go down. In 1975, these bank-friendly Democrats spread the rumor that Patman was an autocratic chairman biased against junior congressmen. To new members eager to participate in policymaking, this was a searing indictment.

The campaign to oust Patman was brief and savage. Michigan’s Bob Carr, a member of the 1975 class, told me the main charge against Patman was that he was an incompetent chairman (a charge with which the nonprofit Common Cause agreed). One of the revolt’s leaders, Edward Pattison, actually felt warmly toward Patman and his legendary populist career. But, “there was just a feeling that he had lost control of his committee.”

Not all on the left were swayed. Barbara Jordan, the renowned representative from Texas, spoke eloquently in Patman’s defense. Ralph Nader raged at the betrayal of a warrior against corporate power. And California’s Henry Waxman, one of the few populist Watergate Babies, broke with his class, puzzled by all the liberals who opposed Patman’s chairmanship. Still, Patman was crushed. Of the three chairmen who fell, Patman lost by the biggest margin. A week later, the bank-friendly members of the committee completed their takeover. Leonor Sullivan—a Missouri populist, the only woman on the Banking Committee, and the author of the Fair Credit Reporting Act—was removed from her position as the subcommittee chair in revenge for her support of Patman. “A revolution has occurred,” noted The Washington Post. The Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public.

Indeed, a revolution had occurred. But the contours of that revolution would not be clear for decades. In 1974, young liberals did not perceive financial power as a threat, having grown up in a world where banks and big business were largely kept under control. It was the government—through Vietnam, Nixon, and executive power—that organized the political spectrum. By 1975, liberalism meant, as Carr put it, “where you were on issues like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.” With the exception of a few new members, like Miller and Waxman, suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.

Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.

The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path. The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump. (...)

For most Americans, the institutions that touch their lives are unreachable. Americans get broadband through Comcast, their internet through Google, their seeds and chemicals through Monsanto. They sell their grain through Cargill and buy everything from books to lawnmowers through Amazon. Open markets are gone, replaced by a handful of corporate giants. Political groups associated with Koch Industries have a larger budget than either political party, and there is no faith in what was once the most democratically responsive part of government: Congress. Steeped in centralized power and mistrust, Americans must now confront Donald Trump, the loudest and most grotesque symbol of authoritarianism in politics today.

“This,” wrote Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, “is how fascism comes to America.” The nation is awash in commentary and fear over the current cultural moment. “America is a breeding ground for tyranny,” wrote Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. Yet, Trump’s emergence would not be a surprise to someone like Patman, or to most New Dealers. They would note that the real-estate mogul’s authoritarianism is not new in American culture; it is ubiquitous. It is consistent with how the commercial sphere has developed since the 1970s. Americans feel a lack of control: They are at the mercy of distant forces, their livelihoods dependent on the arbitrary whims of power. Patman once attacked chain stores as un-American, saying, “We, the American people, want no part of monopolistic dictatorship in … American business.” Having yielded to monopolies in business, the nation must now face the un-American threat to democracy Patman warned they would sow.

by Matt Stoller, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Pete Ryan

What is Patreon?

[ed. I'd never heard about Patreon until today. According to their website: "Patreon is a way to get paid for creating the things you’re already creating (webcomics, videos, songs, whatevs). Fans pay a few bucks per month OR per post you release, and then you get paid every month, or every time you release something new."

I don't know. This might be totally ok. Maybe there is a large untapped market of people just chomping at the bit to become 'patrons of the arts.' I don't know, and don't really care. I am ambivalent though about the apparent proliferation of 'crowdfunding' businesses the last few years. Businesses who's principle business model seems to rely mainly on the empathy of strangers. GoFundMe is a particular head-scratcher. Here's a story from a recent Washington Post article. There's even a site dedicated to compiling stories like this called GoFraudMe. It's like an acceptable form of begging. Maybe I'll have something more lucid to say at another time, but right now I just have this kind of icky feeling. Sort of like, anything that plays on the good intentions or emotions of people is immediately suspect. But sometimes maybe not.]

As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password.

Except it’s not your mother. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her.

It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone.

Such a situation is still science fiction — but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

The software components necessary to make such masking technology widely accessible are advancing rapidly. Recently, for example, DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary known for a program that has bested some of the top human players in the board game Go, announced that it had designed a program that “mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing text-to-speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50 percent.”

The irony, of course, is that this year the computer security industry, with $75 billion in annual revenue, has started to talk about how machine learning and pattern recognition techniques will improve the woeful state of computer security.

But there is a downside.

“The thing people don’t get is that cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially,” said Marc Goodman, a law enforcement agency adviser and the author of “Future Crimes.” He added, “This is not about Matthew Broderick hacking from his basement,” a reference to the 1983 movie “War Games.”

The alarm about malevolent use of advanced artificial intelligence technologies was sounded earlier this year by James R. Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. In his annual review of security, Mr. Clapper underscored the point that while A.I. systems would make some things easier, they would also expand the vulnerabilities of the online world.

The growing sophistication of computer criminals can be seen in the evolution of attack tools like the widely used malicious program known as Blackshades, according to Mr. Goodman. The author of the program, a Swedish national, was convicted last year in the United States.

The system, which was sold widely in the computer underground, functioned as a “criminal franchise in a box,” Mr. Goodman said. It allowed users without technical skills to deploy computer ransomware or perform video or audio eavesdropping with a mouse click.

The next generation of these tools will add machine learning capabilities that have been pioneered by artificial intelligence researchers to improve the quality of machine vision, speech understanding, speech synthesis and natural language understanding. Some computer security researchers believe that digital criminals have been experimenting with the use of A.I. technologies for more than half a decade.

by John Markoff, NY Times |  Read more:

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The Last 5 Minutes of Seahawks-Cardinals Were So Stupid, and So Fun

[ed. Gets my vote for Worst NFL Game Ever just on the number of penalties. Still, it almost seemed like a real game might break out of this slow motion car wreck at the end. Alas, it was not to be. If you were lucky enough to miss it, here's a short recap:]

Seahawks-Cardinals was the most absurd game of the 2016 NFL season. Looking at the 6-6 final score, you might assume it was really boring. And for the most part, it was! The game went to overtime, and watching it live it was hard not to assume that it was going to end in a tie given how the preceding 60 minutes had gone. Defense ruled. The Seahawks gained just 130 yards of offense in regulation. The Cardinals gained 326, but also had a punt and field goal blocked to allow the Seahawks to hang around.

Then something incredible happened late night, the type of delirious nuttiness that can only occur after you’ve been watching 13 straight hours of football and had just finally started nodding off. Both offenses sprung to life. Players made plays, coaches made weird coaching decisions, and two professional kickers missed kicks they should make more than 90 percent of the time.

Let’s pick up the action with 5:15 left to play.

by Louis Bien , SB Nation | Read more:
Image:Norm Hall/Getty Images

Playgroup / Das Programm / Walter Knoll London / Systems / Poster / 2013
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Pau Buscató, New York City 2014
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The Binge Breaker

[ed. I was reflecting this morning on what my generation (the Boomers) have actually accomplished in their mercifully receding tenure here and came to the conclusion - not much. Sure, we've made some great music (riffing off blues and jazz pioneers from the earlier 20th century), but what else? What products, discoveries or achievements might be considered uniquely specific to our times? With the exception of science and medical advances (themselves logical extensions of previous work, as science always is) it seems we've mostly miniturized and personalized. The Internet? Conceived and developed by the Dept. of Defense as ARPANET in the early 1960s. Personal computers? Miniturized mainframes. Mobile phones? Miniturized personal computers. Actually, with the possible exception of the World Wide Web (itself built on hypertext and memex technologies of the 50s and early 60s) anything associated with digitization (software, streaming services, photography, etc.) can be seen as an organic refinement of pre-existent technologies. So what have we actually accomplished? Well, we've made life easier in many ways, but at the same time harder. Our quality of life has improved, but at the expense of economic security. Our jets fly farther and faster, our tv's are bigger and lighter, agricultural systems are more productive, energy extraction technologies more advanced, and luxury items are... luxurier. But our politics have devolved, our infrastructure is decrepit, financial systems are gamed and predatory, and our businesses exploitive and environmentally destructive. I'm sure you can come up with many examples of your own. In the process, we've absorbed the unintended consequences of all this, and who would deny that these things have not had a profound effect on our culture and personal psyches, not to mention interpersonal relationships? I don't know, maybe I'm just feeling cranky this morning, but I have the feeling that this relentless pursuit of personalization and exploitation has created another level of collective anxiety that we're only now beginning to grapple with. So, this article seemed to hit the spot. See also: The Most Popular Office on Campus.]

On a recent evening in San Francisco, Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, took a name tag from a man in pajamas called “Honey Bear” and wrote down his pseudonym for the night: “Presence.”

Harris had just arrived at Unplug SF, a “digital detox experiment” held in honor of the National Day of Unplugging, and the organizers had banned real names. Also outlawed: clocks, “w-talk” (work talk), and “WMDs” (the planners’ loaded shorthand for wireless mobile devices). Harris, a slight 32-year-old with copper hair and a tidy beard, surrendered his iPhone, a device he considers so addictive that he’s called it “a slot machine in my pocket.” He keeps the background set to an image of Scrabble tiles spelling out the wordsface down, a reminder of the device’s optimal position.

I followed him into a spacious venue packed with nearly 400 people painting faces, filling in coloring books, and wrapping yarn around chopsticks. Despite the cheerful summer-camp atmosphere, the event was a reminder of the binary choice facing smartphone owners, who, according to one study, consult their device 150 times a day: Leave the WMD on and deal with relentless prompts compelling them to check its screen, or else completely disconnect. “It doesn’t have to be the all-or-nothing choice,” Harris told me after taking in the arts-and-crafts scene. “That’s a design failure.”

Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience. As the co‑founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group, he is trying to bring moral integrity to software design: essentially, to persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from its devices.

While some blame our collective tech addiction on personal failings, like weak willpower, Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” “You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.

Under the auspices of Time Well Spent, Harris is leading a movement to change the fundamentals of software design. He is rallying product designers to adopt a “Hippocratic oath” for software that, he explains, would check the practice of “exposing people’s psychological vulnerabilities” and restore “agency” to users. “There needs to be new ratings, new criteria, new design standards, new certification standards,” he says. “There is a way to design based not on addiction.”

Joe Edelman—who did much of the research informing Time Well Spent’s vision and is the co-director of a think tank advocating for more-respectful software design—likens Harris to a tech-focused Ralph Nader. Other people, including Adam Alter, a marketing professor at NYU, have championed theses similar to Harris’s; but according to Josh Elman, a Silicon Valley veteran with the venture-capital firm Greylock Partners, Harris is “the first putting it together in this way”—articulating the problem, its societal cost, and ideas for tackling it. Elman compares the tech industry to Big Tobacco before the link between cigarettes and cancer was established: keen to give customers more of what they want, yet simultaneously inflicting collateral damage on their lives. Harris, Elman says, is offering Silicon Valley a chance to reevaluate before more-immersive technology, like virtual reality, pushes us beyond a point of no return. (...)

Harris dropped out of the master’s program to launch a start-up that installed explanatory pop-ups across thousands of sites, including The New York Times’. It was his first direct exposure to the war being waged for our time, and Harris felt torn between his company’s social mission, which was to spark curiosity by making facts easily accessible, and pressure from publishers to corral users into spending more and more minutes on their sites. Though Harris insists he steered clear of persuasive tactics, he grew more familiar with how they were applied. He came to conceive of them as “hijacking techniques”—the digital version of pumping sugar, salt, and fat into junk food in order to induce bingeing.

McDonald’s hooks us by appealing to our bodies’ craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.” Messages, photos, and “likes” appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we’ll receive that dopamine-activating prize. (Delivering rewards at random has been proved to quickly and strongly reinforce behavior.) Checking that Facebook friend request will take only a few seconds, we reason, though research shows that when interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task.

Sites foster a sort of distracted lingering partly by lumping multiple services together. To answer the friend request, we’ll pass by the News Feed, where pictures and auto-play videos seduce us into scrolling through an infinite stream of posts—what Harris calls a “bottomless bowl,” referring to a study that found people eat 73 percent more soup out of self-refilling bowls than out of regular ones, without realizing they’ve consumed extra. The “friend request” tab will nudge us to add even more contacts by suggesting “people you may know,” and in a split second, our unconscious impulses cause the cycle to continue: Once we send the friend request, an alert appears on the recipient’s phone in bright red—a “trigger” color, Harris says, more likely than some other hues to make people click—and because seeing our name taps into a hardwired sense of social obligation, she will drop everything to answer. In the end, he says, companies “stand back watching as a billion people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, responding to each other and feeling indebted to each other.”

by Bianca Bosker, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Olaf Blecker

Gene Editing and Seed Stealing

Four hundred years ago, John Rolfe used tobacco seeds pilfered from the West Indies to develop Virginia’s first profitable export, undermining the tobacco trade of Spain’s Caribbean colonies. More than 200 years later, another Briton, Henry Wickham, took seeds for a rubber-bearing tree from Brazil to Asia – via that great colonialist institution, London’s Royal Botanic Gardens – thereby setting the stage for the eventual demise of the Amazonian rubber boom.

At a time of unregulated plant exports, all it took was a suitcase full of seeds to damage livelihoods and even entire economies. Thanks to advances in genetics, it may soon take even less.

To be sure, over the last few decades, great strides have been made in regulating the deliberate movement of the genetic material of animals, plants, and other living things across borders. The 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, in particular, has helped to safeguard the rights of providers of genetic resources – such as (ideally) the farmers and indigenous people who have protected and nurtured valuable genes – by enshrining national sovereignty over biodiversity.

While some people surely manage to evade regulations, laboriously developed legal systems ensure that it is far from easy. The majority of international exchanges of seeds, plants, animals, microbes, and other biological goods are accompanied by the requisite permits, including a material transfer agreement.

But what if one did not have to send any material at all? What if all it took to usurp the desired seeds was a simple email? What if, with only gene sequences, scientists could “animate” the appropriate genetic material? Such Internet-facilitated exchanges of biodiversity would clearly be much harder to regulate. And, with gene sequencing becoming faster and cheaper than ever, and gene-editing technology advancing rapidly, such exchanges may be possible sooner than you think.

In fact, genes, even entire organisms, can already move virtually – squishy and biological at each end, but nothing more than a series of ones and zeros while en route. The tiny virus that causes influenza is a leading-edge example of technical developments.

Today, when a new strain of influenza appears in Asia, scientists collect a throat swab, isolate the virus, and run the strain’s genetic sequence. If they then post that strain’s sequence on the Internet, American and European laboratories may be able to synthesize the new virus from the downloaded data faster and more easily than if they wait for a courier to deliver a physical sample. The virus can spread faster electronically than it does in nature. (...)

Managing access to large genomic databases thus becomes critically important to prevent a virtual version of the theft carried out by Rolfe and Wickham. And, indeed, in an unguarded e-mail released under the US Freedom of Information Act, one of the US Department of Agriculture’s top maize scientists, Edward Buckler, called such management “the big issue of our time” for plant breeding.

If agricultural biotechnology corporations like Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer – not to mention other firms that work with genetic resources, including pharmaceutical companies and synthetic biology startups – have free access to such databases, the providers of the desired genes are very likely to lose out. These are, after all, wholly capitalist enterprises, with little financial incentive to look out for the little guy.

In this case, that “little guy” could be African sorghum growers, traditional medicinal practitioners, forest peoples, or other traditional communities – people who have created and nurtured biodiversity, but never had the hubris or greed to claim the genes as proprietary, patented inventions. All it would take is for someone to sequence their creations, and share the data in open databases.

Yet open access is the mode du jour in sharing research data. The US government’s GenBank, for example, doesn’t even have an agreement banning misappropriation. This must change. After all, such no-strings-attached databases do not just facilitate sharing; they enable stealing.

by Chee Yoke Ling and Edward Hammond, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Image: Christopher Furlong/Getty

Google’s Ad Tracking is as Creepy as Facebook's. Here’s How to Disable It

Since Google changed the way it tracks its users across the internet in June 2016, users’ personally identifiable information from Gmail, YouTube and other accounts has been merged with their browsing records from across the web.

An analysis of the changes conducted by Propublica details how the company had previously pledged to keep these two data sets separate to protect individuals’ privacy, but updated its privacy settings in June to delete a clause that said “we will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent”.

ProPublica highlights that when Google first made the changes in June, they received little scrutiny. Media reports focused on the tools the company introduced to allow users to view and manage ad tracking rather than the new powers Google gained.

DoubleClick is an advertising serving and tracking company that Google bought in 2007. DoubleClick uses web cookies to track browsing behaviour online by their IP address to deliver targeted ads. It can make a good guess about your location and habits, but it doesn’t know your true identity.

Google, on the other hand, has users’ (mostly) real names, email accounts and search data.

At the time of the acquisition, a number of consumer groups made a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission arguing that bringing these data sets together would represent a huge invasion of privacy, giving the company access to more information about the internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world.

Sergey Brin reassured privacy campaigners, saying: “Overall, we care very much about end-user privacy, and that will take a number one priority when we talk about advertising products.”

In 2012, Google made a controversial update to its privacy policy to allow it to share data about users between different Google services, but it kept DoubleClick separate.

In practice, this means that Google can now, if it wanted to, build up even richer profiles of named individuals’ online activity. It also means that the DoubleClick ads that follow people on the web could be personalized based on the keywords that individuals use in Gmail.

Google isn’t the first company to track individuals in this way. Facebook has been tracking logged-in users (and even non-users) by name across the internet whenever they visit websites with Facebook “like” or “share” buttons.

Google says that the change is optional and is aimed at giving people better control over their data. (...)

The company says that more than one billion Google users have accessed the ‘My Account’ settings that let them control how their data is used.

“Before we launched this update, we tested it around the world with the goal of understanding how to provide users with clear choice and transparency,” Google said. “As a result, it is 100% optional - if users do not opt-in to these changes, their Google experience will remain unchanged. Equally important: we provided prominent user notifications about this change in easy-to-understand language as well as simple tools that let users control or delete their data.”

Users that don’t want to be tracked in this way can visit the activity controls section of their account page on Google, unticking the box marked “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services”.

by Olivia Solon, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Baz Ratner/Reuters

The VSED Exit

A Way to Speed Up Dying, Without Asking Permission

[ed. This is something I've harped on for years. I can't understand how our society (families, legal institutions, religions, businesses, politicians, medical professionals, etc.) continues to do everything it can to prolong life (for a variety of reasons, many of them self-serving), despite the wishes of those most acutely affected. From the moment we're born we're encouraged to control our impulses, our bodies, our environment, our destinies, but as lives wind down or take unexpected turns that control is wrested away and we're forced to endure all manner of medical interventions, indignities, isolation, and pain. How does that seem right? Or compassionate? And, for what purpose? We treat our pets better. I have the extreme view that any adult should be able to obtain a life-ending cocktail of pills that can be taken at any time. Any time, not just when facing some terminal illness. You want to go? Go. It's the most profound decision an individual can make, and should be honored as such. Instead, we force people to use guns, and ropes, poisons, automobiles, high dives and any number of other horrific solutions, including starving themselves. It's barbaric. Thankfully, I don't think the life-at-all-costs attitude will last much longer (especially as Boomers confront the inevitable), and it's possible that a more personally empowered ending (to the extent possible) might actually have the benefit of making life up to that point much less anxious. Someday we'll have a more humane alternative, and I hope it's something like this: Sol's Euthanasia. See also: I am not afraid of death. I worry about living.]

Del Greenfield had endured repeated bouts of cancer over four decades, yet kept working as a peace activist in Portland, Ore., into her 80s. “She was a powerful force,” said her daughter, Bonnie Reagan.

But in 2007, Ms. Greenfield was struggling. She had been her husband’s caregiver until he died that year at 97, never telling her family she was feeling miserable herself. She’d lost much of her hearing. She required supplemental oxygen.

When she fell and broke an arm, “that was the final straw,” her daughter said. “She was a real doer, and she couldn’t function the way she wanted to. Life wasn’t joyful anymore.”

At 91, Ms. Greenfield told her family she was ready to die. She wanted a prescription for lethal drugs, and because she had active cancer, she might have obtained one under Oregon’s Death with Dignity statute for people with terminal illnesses.

Then her son-in-law, a family physician who had written such prescriptions for other patients, explained the somewhat involved process: oral and written requests, a waiting period, two physicians’ assent.

“I don’t have time for that,” Ms. Greenfield objected. “I’m just going to stop eating and drinking.”

In end-of-life circles, this option is called VSED (usually pronounced VEEsed), for voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. It causes death by dehydration, usually within seven to 14 days. To people with serious illnesses who want to hasten their deaths, a small but determined group, VSED can sound like a reasonable exit strategy.

Unlike aid with dying, now legal in five states, it doesn’t require governmental action or physicians’ authorization. Patients don’t need a terminal diagnosis, and they don’t have to prove mental capacity. They do need resolve. (...)

Can VSED be comfortable and provide a peaceful death?

“The start of it is generally quite comfortable,” Dr. Quill said he had found, having cared for such patients. The not-eating part comes fairly easily, health professionals say; the seriously ill often lose their appetites anyway.

Coping with thirst can be much more difficult. Yet even sips of water prolong the dying process.

“You want a medical partner to manage your symptoms,” Dr. Quill said. “It’s harder than you think.”

Keeping patients’ mouths moistened and having aggressive pain medication available make a big difference, health professionals say.

At the conference, the Dutch researcher Dr. Eva Bolt presented results from a survey of family physicians in the Netherlands, describing 99 cases of VSED. Their patients (median age: 83) had serious diseases and depended on others for everyday care; three-quarters had life expectancies of less than a year.

In their final three days, their doctors reported, 14 percent suffered pain, and smaller percentages experienced fatigue, impaired cognition, thirst or delirium.

Still, 80 percent of the physicians said the process had unfolded as the patients wanted; only 2 percent said it hadn’t. The median time from the start of their fasts until death was seven days.

Those results mirror a 2003 study of hospice nurses in Oregon who had cared for VSED patients. Rating their deaths on a scale from 0 to 9 (a very good death), the nurses assigned a median score of 8. Nearly all of the patients died within 15 days.

The slower pace of death from fasting, compared with ingesting barbiturates, gives people time to say goodbye and, for the first few days, to change their minds. Several conference speakers described patients who had fasted and stopped a few times before continuing until death.

That’s hard on families and caregivers, though. And slowness won’t benefit people who are dying with severe shortness of breath or pain. “Two weeks is a lifetime in that situation,” Dr. Quill said.

by Paula Span, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ezra Marcos

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The Appeal of Drones

Less than fifteen years after the first use of an armed drone by the United States, over 50 percent of the pilots being trained by the U.S. Air Force are drone pilots, and the proportion of remotely piloted aircraft in the U.S. fleet went from 5 percent in 2005 to 31 percent by 2012. This is an extraordinary turnabout. Drones have proved attractive to the U.S. military for four principal reasons. First, they are far superior to both satellites and manned aircraft as tools for reconnaissance. Manned aircraft run out of fuel after a few hours, satellites pass over a site and then move on, but drones can linger over a location for a day or more, watching who enters and leaves a building or tracking the movements of people and vehicles that seem suspicious. They can also use infrared cameras to track people at night. And the video footage they generate can be archived so that it can be searched after attacks for signs of insurgent preparation. In such ways, drone surveillance helps in the mapping of insurgent networks and patterns of life as well as in locating arms caches and hiding places. The holy grail for drone advocates is a massive archive of drone surveillance footage that can be rewound so that analysts can work backward along an insurgent network—beginning with the explosion of a buried improvised explosive device and moving back to the insurgent who buried the device, the person from whom he collected it, and the bomb maker. So far, however, the enormous quantity, and often poor quality, of imagery has largely stymied attempts at this kind of data mining.

Second, in the words of General David Deptula, “The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without projecting vulnerability.’’ Because the drone operator is safely ensconced in a trailer in Nevada, no American is killed or injured if a drone crashes or is shot down. This is beneficial in that the military does not like to see pilots killed, but also in the political sense that a war without American casualties is more likely to be a war without American opposition. Admiral Dennis Blair, former director of national intelligence, describes drone warfare as “politically advantageous.” Saying that drone warfare enables a president to look tough without incurring American casualties, he adds, “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries.” In the words of British commentator Stephen Holmes, drones have “allowed the Pentagon to wage a war against which antiwar forces are apparently unable to rally even modest public support.”

Third, drones are cheaper than other aircraft, even after the costs of large support crews are considered, according to most analysts. Manned planes cost more to build because they have added features and redundant systems for the safety and comfort of their human occupants. (Drones, for example, have only one engine.) A Predator drone costs about $4.5 million, and a Reaper around $22 million. By comparison, an F-16 is about $47 million, and each new F-35 is projected to cost the American taxpayer between $148 million and $337 million. And training a drone operator costs less than 10 percent of what it costs to train a fast-jet pilot. Even though up to 50 percent of the U.S. Predator fleet has been involved in crashes, many of which destroyed the plane, they are still a bargain.

Finally, their video surveillance capability and laser-guided munitions afford drones high levels of precision in the execution of attacks. Ground artillery certainly cannot match the precision of a Hellfire missile. Although other aircraft with laser-guided bombs may be able to achieve comparable levels of accuracy, the drone can linger for hours waiting for a good shot. Reportedly, this has been particularly important to President Obama. The New York Times said that “the drone’s vaunted capability for pinpoint killing appealed to a president intrigued by a new technology and determined to try to keep the United States out of new quagmires. Aides said Mr. Obama liked the idea of picking off dangerous terrorists a few at a time, without endangering American lives or risking the years-long bloodshed of conventional war.”

It is important to understand that the drone is not just a new machine that has been slotted into existing war plans in a space formerly occupied by other kinds of airpower. Instead, in concert with special forces on the ground, it is a pivot around which the United States has created a new approach to counterinsurgency warfare and border policing that is organized around new strategies of information gathering, precision targeting, and reconceptualizing enemy forces as a cluster of networks and nodal leaders.

by Hugh Gusterson, IAS | Read more:
Image: AP

The Seven Mystery Gut Problems Your Doctor May Not Spot

Millions of people in the UK are living with mystery gut problems they struggle to get diagnosed correctly.

They’re often told they have irritable bowel syndrome — for which there’s no specific treatment — but experts believe a significant proportion may actually have other conditions that, unlike IBS, can be tested for and even cured.

That’s the thinking in a new book, co-authored by a leading gastroenterologist, which suggests this misdiagnosis means patients can spend years without treatment — or receiving the wrong treatment, which could make symptoms worse.

Michelle O’Connor was one of those affected. For 22 years she struggled with debilitating gut symptoms.

‘My stomach bloated so much people asked me if I was pregnant, and it was also really painful,’ recalls Michelle, 43, a nurse from Matlock, Derbyshire.

She also had to often rush to the loo because of diarrhoea. Michelle first saw her GP about her symptoms when she was 18, but it proved to be just the first of a series of frustrating experiences.

‘At first I was told that it was irritable bowel syndrome and I should eat more fibre, but this made my symptoms worse.

‘At another stage I was given loperamide pills to control my diarrhoea.

‘On many occasions my GP said my symptoms were down to being “too stressed” and other times he said I was suffering from depression and panic attacks.’

Over the years she had tests for coeliac disease and lactose intolerance, as well as two colonoscopies — where the bowel is examined using a flexible tube with a camera at the end — to check for Crohn’s disease.

She was also tested for overgrowth of candida (a yeast) but the results were negative.

By her mid-20s Michelle’s symptoms had worsened. ‘I worked on a gastroenterology ward and remember thinking that my problems were worse than the patients’.

‘Sometimes I’d have up to ten bouts a day of diarrhoea, including at night. It left me feeling drained.’

Over the next decade Michelle’s long-term relationship broke down — partly because of the stress of her illness.

She also made the difficult decision not to have children ‘because I thought I’d be too ill to look after them’.

Then, three years ago, Michelle’s cousin, a medical sales rep, heard a gastroenterologist speak at a meeting about severe IBS and urged Michelle to seek a referral.

The specialist arranged six tests, including one for bile acid malabsorption (also known as bile acid diarrhoea), a condition that affects up to a million Britons.

It’s caused by an excess of bile acid, which is produced by the liver to break down fats.

The result was positive and Michelle is now having treatment that’s dramatically improved her symptoms.

‘When I found out about how common this condition is I wondered why no one tested me earlier,’ says Michelle, who last year helped set up a charity to raise awareness of the problem.

In fact, this is just one of number of relatively unknown but surprisingly common gut complaints that could be the root cause of mystery symptoms such as bloating and diarrhoea in millions, according to Professor Julian Walters, a consultant gastroenterologist at Imperial College Healthcare in London, and co-author of What’s Up With Your Gut?

‘Bile acid diarrhoea, for instance, is estimated to be the cause of a third of irritable bowel cases where diarrhoea is the predominant symptom,’ he says.

However many patients are not referred early enough for tests and the condition often goes undetected.

One survey of 706 British gastroenterologists found only 6 per cent of patients referred to them with chronic diarrhoea had been tested for bile acid malabsorption as a first-line investigation.

‘I see an endless stream of patients told they had IBS or chronic constipation, for instance, often suffering years of misery with their symptoms but simple tests could pinpoint the real cause,’ says Professor Walters.

‘The problem is they often end up being given treatments that could make their symptoms worse. But with the right treatment, their symptoms often clear up.’

Here we look at seven little-known, but common, gut conditions. Could one of these explain your symptoms?

by The Daily Mail |  Read more:

Image: Getty