All That's Left When You Die

[ed. Too much negativity lately. Here are a couple Justin Halpern posts to lighten things up a little with his dad's unique form of wisdom.]

Last month my dad turned seventy-eight years old. A few days before his birthday, I drove down to San Diego to see him.

“What do you want for your birthday,” I asked, as we sat in his living room.

“I want to talk to you about something. Let’s take the dog for a walk,” he said, as he grabbed a leash that sat next to his recliner. “You take the shit bag,” he added, handing me a bundled up plastic baggy.

We headed up his quiet suburban street as his large brown Rottweiler mix walked ahead.

“The human body wasn’t meant to live this long,” he said.

“Seventy-eight is not that old,” I replied.

“Do we have to sit here and dignify a clearly horseshit statement such as that, or can you cease to pander to me and just have a conversation?”

“Okay. Seventy-eight is old.”

He hiked up his sweatpants and quickened the pace of our walk.

“I’m not complaining. I’m just saying people peddle this ridiculous idea that you can be an old person and go water skiing and fuck whenever you want and it’s bullshit. It’s fucking hubris that’s specific to humans and no other species,” he said, as he yanked the dog’s leash, pulling it away from the neighbor’s lawn right before it trampled their flowers.

“Well, the other option is to just accept that death is coming for you,” I replied.

“It is coming for you. You can’t beat death. It’s un-fucking-defeated. And if you fight it, it will humiliate you. It’ll chain you to a bed and make someone have to wipe your shitty ass. It’ll make you forget who your own fucking kids are. It takes your dignity and it whips its’ dick out and pisses on it. When you’re younger and it comes for you, it’s worth it to fight it and suffer through the humiliation. When you’re older, what the fuck does it get you to go through that?,” he said, then took a deep breath and stopped on the sidewalk.

I looked at him collecting his thoughts and every muscle in my stomach contracted in fear. I could barely get out my next words.

“Are you dying?” I asked.

“What? Fuck no. If I was dying I’d just call you up and say ‘Hey, I’m dying.’

“I would prefer you didn’t do it like that,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Like I’m going to give a shit what you prefer when I’m dying,” he laughed, as he began walking again.

So then why are you bringing this up?”

“Take a look at the dog,” he said, pointing at his best friend. “The dog gives a shit about three things, in this order; Living, fucking, eating. Now, if he’s eating, and the opportunity to fuck presents itself, he’d stop eating so that he could fuck. And if he’s fucking, and something threatens his livelihood, he’d stop fucking so that he could protect himself. What does that tell you?” he asked.

“I don’t know, isn’t that, like, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or something?”

“I’m okay with you just saying ‘I don’t know.’ I’d actually prefer that to a dumb answer.”

“I don’t know, dad,” I said, getting a little annoyed.

“The dog, just like every other animal including us, thinks first and foremost about staying alive and passing on their genetics. It’s in our DNA to do so. You spend all your time when you’re young making sure you do all the best eating, fucking, and living you can. But then you get old like me and you can’t even tell if you farted and nothing in your body works like it used to. And you start to think, or at least I do, about how you can spend all your most effective years on this planet, which is filled with billions of people, not giving a shit about anybody but the ten or so motherfuckers that share your blood. And I think human beings are capable of more than just that. And we should want to be. Because when you die, all that’s left of you is the people you gave a shit about. Everybody loves to say how much we’ve evolved, but the real measure of whether or not a species has evolved is if they can look their DNA in the eyes and say, ‘Fuck you, I can do better than you think I can.’

by Justin Halpern, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Justin Halpern

You Will Never Sleep With a Woman Like That

If you discount countless, forgettable chunks of time spent at school, home, and 7-Eleven, I passed most of my waking hours from ages ten through twelve playing baseball and goofing off with friends at the Point Loma Little League fields. Those two adjacent baseball fields were about a mile from my house, and twice a week my team, the San Diego Credit Union Padres, would gather there to practice.

"You should just be called the Padres, not all that bullshit about credit unions," my dad said, as he drove me to the field on the opening day of the season when I was eleven years old.

"But the credit union pays for us to have a team," I said.

"Yeah, well, I pay for you to do everything, and you don't see me making you wear a shirt with my giant goddamned face on it."

"That would be a weird shirt," I said.

"Please. You wear all kinds of dopey shirts, and — what the fuck am I talking about right here? The shirt's not real, I'm just making a point. You got your gear?" he asked, pulling up to the field.

Saturdays were filled with a full lineup of games, all of which the league's players were required to attend, so my parents could drop me off bright and early and then do whatever they wanted all day until my game. The prospect of a morning to himself was very exciting for my dad.

"There's a lot of good teams this year, I think," I said, continuing our conversation as we arrived at the fields.

He reached over me and popped open my door.

"Fascinating. Now out of the car. Vamoose. Out! Out! Have fun and don't screw with anyone bigger than you. I'll be in the stands when your game starts," he said.

I put my hand up for a high five, and he used that hand to push me out of the car. Then his Oldsmobile screeched away up the street, like he was fleeing the scene of a double homicide.

When we weren't playing in a game, most of the Little Leaguers would keep busy playing tag in between the two fields or eating a spicy linguiça sausage made by the local Portuguese family that ran the snack shack above the field.

Every once in a while, someone would raise talk of venturing into the canyon that sat about fifty yards beyond the outfield fences. We were all scared of the canyon. It was packed with trees that grew so close together their branches became intertwined like a bundle of snakes. The canyon's ground was muddy, and it emitted an odor that registered somewhere between "maple syrup" and "rest-stop bath room." It was a group of cannibals short of being the perfect setting for an Indiana Jones film.

Every kid you ran into had a different theory about what lurked inside the canyon walls. "My brother found a pile of poo there that he said was too big to be dog poo or cat poo, but not big enough to be human poo. He said it's probably wolf poo," said my friend Steven as we waited for the game ahead of us to finish so we could take the field.

"Your brother's an idiot," said Michael, the chubby catcher on my team, who always wore his hat backward, so that the back of it came down right above his dark-green eyes. "A bunch of gays live in there. That's where they butt-fuck each other."

"What? Why wouldn't they do that at their house?" I asked.

"I don't know, I'm not a homo. But if you want to get butt-fucked, go into that canyon," he responded, inhaling a bite of sausage that would have killed a lesser twelve-year-old.

At that point in my life, the only two things that scared me were the movie Arachnophobia and that canyon. I tried to never get too close to it, for fear that something might reach out of the forest and pull me in. If I absolutely had to go near to chase an errant throw, my neck would stiffen and my breath would quicken as my body prepared to flee. I decided to run the theories about its inhabitants past my father to see if he had a scientific opinion on the matter.

"Why would gay people screw each other in a canyon filled with wolves?" my dad asked me as he drove us home after my game, my mom sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

"No, that's not what I said. One kid said there were wolves. It was a different kid who said the thing — "

"Hey, look at me, I'm screwing. My pants are off. Oh shit, there's an angry fucking wolf. Does that make any goddamn sense to you?"

"No. But that's not — "

"Plus," my dad interrupted again, "I don't even think wolves are indigenous to this area. Your school takes field trips. You ever heard them say shit to you about wolves? You gotta think about these things critically, son."

"No, I do. I didn't think that the wolves were — "

My mom turned to face me in the backseat. "Also, Justy, you know that homosexuals have sex just like heterosexuals do: in the privacy of their homes. Not in the woods."

"Although sometimes straight people do screw each other in the woods. Mostly when you're in high school, though," my dad added.

I decided to drop the conversation. But that week, on two consecutive nights, I had nightmares about the canyon. Each involved me finding something terrifying in a clearing at the center. In the first dream, I stumbled upon an aquarium that had a screaming Patrick Swayze trapped inside of it, begging me for help, but I was too scared to approach him. In the second, I was confronted by a large squid that had two or three sets of human legs. After that last dream I shot up out of bed, wide awake. I tried falling back to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes I pictured the canyon, then Swayze, then Squidman.

Hoping it would relax me, I tiptoed out of my bedroom to grab some water from the kitchen. I was still shaken from the dream, and the shapes of the shadows on the hallway wall looked ominous. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move, and I froze in place. It's just a shadow that looks like a person, I told myself. It's not a person.

"What in the hell are you doing?"

I shrieked like a frightened monkey and jumped back, crashing into the bookcase behind me. As my eyes adjusted I realized that the shadow was my dad, sitting in total darkness in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the windows to our backyard.

"Jesus H. Christ. Calm down, son. What the hell is wrong with you?"

"I had a freaky dream," I said, trying to catch my breath. "What are you doing?"

"I'm sitting in the dark drinking a hot toddy. What the hell does it look like?"

"Why are you doing that right now? It's the middle of the night."

"Well, contrary to popular fucking belief, I enjoy a little time to myself, so I wake up early so I can have it. Clearly I'm going to have to start waking up earlier."

"Oh. Well, sorry. Didn't mean to bother you," I said, turning to head back to bed, glass of water forgotten.

"No apologies necessary," he said.

Maybe it was the bourbon in the hot toddy, or the serenity of the darkness all around him, but at that moment my dad seemed uncharacteristically at ease.

"Can I ask you a question?" I said, turning to face him again.

"Fire away."

"If something's freaking you out, what do you do to not freak out about it?"

"Is this about that Arachnophobia movie, again? I told you, a spider that large couldn't sustain itself in an urban environment. The ecosystem is too delicate. Not fucking plausible."

"It's not about Arachnophobia. It's just — if something's freaking you out, how do you get it to not freak you out?"

He raised his mug of hot toddy to his lips and took a big slurp.

"Well, scientifically speaking, human beings fear the unknown. So, whatever's freaking you out, grab it by the balls and say hello," he said.

I had no idea what that meant, and even in the dimly lit living room he could tell.

"I'm saying, if something's scaring you out, don't run from it. Find out everything you can about it. Then it ain't the unknown anymore and it ain't scary." He paused. "Or I guess it could be a shitload scarier. Mostly the former, though."

As I padded down the hallway back to my room, I knew what had to be done: I had to enter the canyon. There was just no way I was going it alone.

by Justin Halpern, Grantland |  Read more:

Photo: courtesy Justin Halpern
[ed. Repost]

Cameras, Ecommerce and Machine Learning

Mobile means that, for the first time, pretty much everyone on earth will have a camera, taking vastly more images than were ever taken on film ('How many pictures?'). This feels like a profound change on a par with, say, the transistor radio making music ubiquitous.

Then, the image sensor in a phone is more than just a camera that takes pictures - it’s also part of new ways of thinking about mobile UIs and services ('Imaging, Snapchat and mobile'), and part of a general shift in what a computer can do ('From mobile first to mobile native').

Meanwhile, image sensors are part of a flood of cheap commodity components coming out of the smartphone supply chain, that enable all kinds of other connected devices - everything from the Amazon Echo and Google Home to an August door lock or Snapchat Spectacles (and of course a botnet of hacked IoT devices). When combined with cloud services and, increasingly, machine learning, these are no longer just cameras or microphones but new endpoints or distribution for services - they’re unbundled pieces of apps. ('Echo, interfaces and friction') This process is only just beginning - it now seems that some machine learning use cases can be embedded into very small and cheap devices. You might train an ‘is there a person in this image?’ neural network in the cloud with a vast image set - but to run it, you can put it on a cheap DSP with a cheap camera, wrap it in plastic and sell it for $10 or $20. These devices will let you use machine learning everywhere, but also let machine learning watch or listen everywhere.

So, smartphones and the smartphone supply chain are enabling a flood of UX and device innovation, with machine learning lighting it all up.

However, I think it’s also worth thinking much more broadly about what computer vision in particular might now mean - thinking about what it might mean that images and video will become almost as transparent to computers as text has always been. You could always search text for ‘dog’ but could never search pictures for a dog - now you’ll be able to do both, and, further, start to get some understanding of what might actually be happening.

We should expect that every image ever taken can be searched or analyzed, and some kind of insight extracted, at massive scale. Every glossy magazine archive is now a structured data set, and so is every video feed. With that incentive (and that smarthone supply chain) far more images and video will be captured.

So, some questions for the future:

• Every autonomous car will, necessarily, capture HD 360 degree video whenever it’s moving. Who owns that data, what else can you do with it beyond driving and how do our ideas of privacy adjust?
• A retailer can deploy cheap commodity wireless HD cameras thoughout the store, or a mall operator the mall, and finally know exactly what track every single person entering took through the building, and what they looked at, and then connect that to the tills for purchase data. How much does that change (surviving) retail?
• What happens to the fashion industry when half a dozen static $100 cameras can tell you everything that anyone in Shoreditch wore this year - when you can trace a trend through social and street photography from start to the mass-market, and then look for the next emerging patterns?
• What happens to ecommerce recommendations when a system might be able to infer things about your taste from your Instagram or Facebook photos, without needing tags or purchase history - when it can see your purchase history in your selfies?

Online retailers have been extremely good at retail as logistics, but much less good at retail as discovery and recommendation - much less good at showing you something you didn’t know you might like ('The Facebook of ecommerce'). I sometimes compare Amazon to Sears Roebuck a century ago - they let you buy anything you could buy in a big city, but they don’t let you shop the way you can in a big city. (I think this is also a big reason why ebook sales have flatlined - what do you buy?)

Now, suppose you buy the last ten years’ issues of Elle Decoration on eBay and drop them into just the right neural networks, and then give that system a photo of your living room and ask which lamps it recommends? All those captioned photos, and the copy around them, are training data. And yet, if you don’t show the user an actual photo from that archive, just a recommendation based on it, you probably don’t need to pay the original print publisher itself anything at all. (Machine learning will be fruitful grounds for IP lawyers.) We don’t have this yet, but we know, pretty much, how we might do it. We have a roadmap to recognize some kind of preferences, automatically, at scale.

The key thing here is that the nice attention-grabbing demos of computer vision that recognize a dog or a tree, or a pedestrian, are just the first, obvious use cases for a fundamental new capability - to read images. And not just to read them the way humans can, but to read a billion and see the patterns. Among many other things, that has implications for a lot of retail, including parts not really affected by Amazon, and indeed for the $500bn spent every year on advertising.

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Image: via:

Ok.
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Cookie Jar

There was a certain accord between them, right from the beginning. The boy thought the old man looked pretty good for ninety, and the old man thought the boy, whose name was Dale, looked pretty good for thirteen.

The kid started by calling him Great-Grandpa, but Barrett was having none of that. “It makes me feel even older than I am. Call me Rhett. That’s what my father called me. I was a Rhett before there was a Rhett Butler—imagine that.”

Dale asked him who Rhett Butler was.

“Never mind. It was a bad book and only a so-so movie. Tell me again about this project of yours.”

“We’re supposed to talk to our oldest relative, and ask what life was like when he was my age. Then I’m supposed to write a two-page report on how much things have changed. But Mr. Kendall hates generalities, so I’m supposed to concentrate on one or two specifics. That means—”

“I know what specifics are,” Rhett said. “Which specifics have you got in mind?”

Dale considered the question. While he did so, Rhett considered the boy: healthy mop of hair, straight back, clear skin and eyes. There were seventy-seven years between them, and Dale Alderson probably considered that an ocean, but to Rhett it was only a lake. Maybe no more than a pond.

You’ll get across it in no time, kiddo, he thought. The brevity of the swim between your bank and mine will surprise you. It certainly surprised me. He wasn’t sure his great-grandson—the youngest of the lot—even thought of him as an actual human being. More like a talking fossil.

“Speak up, Dale. I’ve got all day, but you probably don’t.”

“Well…you remember before there was TV, right?”

Rhett smiled, even though he felt this was a question to which his great-grandson should already have known the answer. He restrained an urge to say, Don’t they teach you kids anything, because it would have been curmudgeonly and impolite. Not to mention ungrateful. This boy had come to the Good Life Retirement Home for the sole purpose of hearing Barrett Alderson talk about the past, a subject that usually had kids running the other way as fast as they could go. It was only for a school assignment, true, but still. He had come all the way across town on the bus, which made Rhett think of trips he and his brother Jack had made on the interurban line to see their mother.

“Dale, I never even saw a television until I was twenty-one. Radar scopes, yes, but no TVs. I had my first confirmed sighting in an appliance-store window, after I got back from the war. I watched for twenty minutes, almost hypnotized.”

“Which war was that?”

“Two,” he said patiently. “Nazis? Hitler? Japanese in the Pacific? Ring any bells?”

“Sure, yeah, banzai charges and all that. I thought you might mean Korea.”

“When Korea blew up, I was married with a couple of kids.”

“Was my grandpa one of them?”

“Yup, he’d just made his appearance.” And when Vietnam rolled around, I was as old as your father is now. Maybe older.

“So you were stuck with radio, huh?”

“Well, yes, but we didn’t consider ourselves stuck with it.”

Outside his room, from down the hall, came the electronically amplified voice of the retirement home’s recreation director (or one of her minions) calling out bingo numbers. Rhett was happy not to be there, although he supposed he would be tomorrow. He was measuring out the last years of his life—maybe down to months now, considering the blood that had started to show up in the bowl when he took a shit—not in coffee spoons but in coverall games.

“No?” Dale asked.

“Absolutely not. After supper, my dad and my brothers would—”

“Wait, wait, hold that thought.” Dale dug into the pocket of his jeans and brought out an iPhone. He fiddled with it and the screen lit up. He fiddled with it some more and then set it on the bed.

“That thing records, too?” Rhett asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Is there anything it doesn’t do?”

“Honey, it don’t do windows,” the boy said, and Rhett laughed. The kid might be a little foggy on twentieth-century history, but he was quick. And funny.

Dale smiled back at his great-grandfather, glad the old guy had gotten the joke, perhaps seeing him as a human being after all, or beginning to. Rhett could hope; even at ninety, he remained mostly optimistic, although optimism was a little harder to manage at three in the morning, lying awake and feeling the threads holding him to this life loosening.

by Stephen King, VQR |  Read more:

Image: Pat Perry

When Ocean Views Become Too Close for Comfort

Real estate agents looking to sell coastal properties usually focus on one thing: how close the home is to the water’s edge. But buyers are increasingly asking instead how far back it is from the waterline. How many feet above sea level? Is it fortified against storm surges? Does it have emergency power and sump pumps?

Rising sea levels are changing the way people think about waterfront real estate. Though demand remains strong and developers continue to build near the water in many coastal cities, homeowners across the nation are slowly growing wary of buying property in areas most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

A warming planet has already forced a number of industries — coal, oil, agriculture and utilities among them — to account for potential future costs of a changed climate. The real estate industry, particularly along the vulnerable coastlines, is slowly awakening to the need to factor in the risks of catastrophic damage from climate change, including that wrought by rising seas and storm-driven flooding.

But many economists say that this reckoning needs to happen much faster and that home buyers urgently need to be better informed. Some analysts say the economic impact of a collapse in the waterfront property market could surpass that of the bursting dot-com and real estate bubbles of 2000 and 2008.

The fallout would be felt by property owners, developers, real estate lenders and the financial institutions that bundle and resell mortgages.

Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions, the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground. (...)

In April, Sean Becketti, the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant, issued a dire prediction. It is only a matter of time, he wrote, before sea level rise and storm surges become so unbearable along the coast that people will leave, ditching their mortgages and potentially triggering another housing meltdown — except this time, it would be unlikely that these housing prices would ever recover.

“Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses,” he wrote. “Others will not be so lucky.”

by Ian Urbina, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Logan R. Cyrus

Ross Carron, Indigo No.1

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He was only a cat.
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Politics 101

The Elephants in Lake Charles

I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump's Biggest Fans. Here's What They Won't Tell You.

The Age of Pain

Workers Don't Need Trump to Give Them a Voice. They Need Unions.

see also:

Robert Reich's 8 Point Plan for a New Democratic Party

Nobody Cooks, and Maybe That's OK

Nobody Cooks, and Maybe That's Ok.
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Morrissey Wants GM to Offer Vegan Leather for Car Interiors

[ed. I know... vegan leather? PETA is all for it. Here's another perspective: Just Say No to Vegan Leather.]

Morrissey has a complaint: the leather that runs smooth on the passenger’s seat isn’t vegan.

The former Smiths frontman has penned a letter to General Motors’ chair and CEO, Mary Barra, asking the automaker to consider adding the option of vegan leather to its interiors. “Given that the Volt and Bolt are being marketed to eco-conscious buyers, entirely vegan options would only broaden their appeal,” the singer-songwriter wrote.

Morrissey cites a recent press release from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) about inhumane conditions in cattle farms, adding that the livestock sector’s greenhouse gas emissions make up a high percentage of the greenhouse gases emitted in the world. (...)

“As I head to Detroit to play the Royal Oak Music Theatre, I’m writing to ask GM to make Chevy’s Volt and Bolt more eco-friendly by giving buyers the option to choose vegan leather interiors – including steering wheels and gear shifts,” Morrissey wrote to Barra.

Elon Musk’s Tesla offers a vegan leather interior, which the CEO himself promoted on Twitter as the best option when it was announced. The company’s Ultra White interior option for Tesla’s Model X SUV veganized the steering wheel and gear shift as well as the seats.

by Sam Thielman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:: PETA

Why is Turkey Cheaper When Demand is Higher?
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Why Fake Data When You Can Fake a Scientist?

Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year: He doesn’t exist. Burkhard Morgenstern, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Gottingen, dreamt him up, and built a nice little scientific career for him. He wrote Cartwright a Curriculum Vitae, describing his doctorate in Studies of Dunnowhat, his rigorous postdoctoral work at Some Shitty Place in the Middle of Nowhere, and his experience as Senior Cattle Manager at the Ponderosa Institute for Bovine Research. Cartwright never published a single research paper, but he was appointed to the editorial boards of five journals. Apparently, no one involved in the application processes remembered the television show Bonanza, or the giant but amiable cowboy named “Hoss” who was played by actor Dan Blocker. Despite Cartwright’s questionable credentials, he was invited to speak at several meetings such as the 5th World Congress on Virology—typically a mark of recognition as an expert.

Morgenstern was tired of the constant barrage of solicitations from suspect science journals asking him to join their editorial boards—the academic equivalent of the flood of credit card applications that anyone with a mailbox receives. “At some point I was just so fed up with all those spam emails from these junk publishers that I just did this little experiment,” he says. “I contacted them under the fake name Peter Uhnemann and asked to be accepted on the editorial board.” Uhnemann was a name borrowed from a German satirical magazine and Morgenstern’s first alter ego.

Uhnemann immediately joined the masthead of the journal Molecular Biology, which belongs to the publishing house OMICS International—which in August was sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for deceptive practices—and is produced “in association” with the Nigerian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Unfortunately, Morgenstern admits, he was a bit too subtle: “Hardly anybody knows the name ‘Peter Uhnemann,’ so I then tried it with a more popular name, and this happened to be Hoss Cartwright.”

He has also found work for Borat Sagdiyev, the character created by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is better known by his first name and less well known as a senior investigator at the University of Kazakhstan, who is still on the editorial board of at least one journal, Immunology and Vaccines. That journal belongs to Academician’s Research Center, a publisher based in India that’s suspected of “predatory” behavior against scientists desperate to see their work in a journal no matter how obscure or unread. (We emailed ARC about its quality control efforts, or lack thereof, but haven’t heard back from them.)

Cartwright, Uhnemann, Borat, and others are, in some sense, sting operations built to expose the growing practice of gaming the metrics by which scientific publications are judged. The number of publications a scholar has, how many times they have been cited, who the co-authors are—metrics like these should all be secondary to the quality of the work itself, but often they are actually more important.

“Scientists no longer publish to share results with their colleagues, but rather to improve their ‘metrics,’ ” laments Morgenstern. These metrics can have real impact on scientists’ careers.

Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has sat on committees tasked with hiring and promoting faculty, and he sees signs of vulnerability in the process. “Committees are somewhat to very self serving and tend to lower the bar based on personal relationships with colleagues,” Calabrese says. “For the most part I doubt that they are very alert to being manipulated and can therefore be easy targets. … In most departments I think it is likely that the faculty may not even evaluate the quality of the papers, giving up their judgment to journals, peer review processes, and the letters of external reviewers,” he adds. “It is easier to use these means for decision making.”

And that’s in the United States. The Medical Council of India recently updated its guidelines to require publication of four papers to become associate professor, and eight to become a full professor. The policy has triggered fears among some scientists that the quality of Indian research will fall as people try to pad their resumes with bogus or crummy papers.

The fact is that professional advancement for scientists around the world is becoming more and more challenging in an era of ever-scarcer funding for research and tightening competition for faculty spots. To succeed in the publish-or-perish environment of academia, most scientists hit the lab and play within the rules. Others, though, hatch schemes.

The nuclear option is faking data. But the complexity of the modern scientific publishing environment has opened a host of new, more sophisticated approaches: fluffing up resumes with scam appointments to editorial boards, adding nonexistent authors to studies (or real, high-powered co-authors who didn’t participate in the research), and even publishing junk journal articles for the sake of publication count.

But, one of today’s most direct new frauds is incredibly simple: Make up new people.

by Adam Marcus & Ivan Oransky, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: nkbimages & Caiaimage/Martin Barraud / Getty

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The F*cking P.C. Culture Problem

A year and a half after I graduated from the infamously progressive Oberlin College, The Washington Post published an article about students protesting the dining hall's own (quite literally tasteless) interpretations of Banh mi and sushi. Students weren't upset about the quality of the food, but rather, its political implications. As one junior from Japan explained, "If people not from that heritage take food, modify it, and serve it as 'authentic,' it is appropriative." An average person might consider this line of reasoning to be far-fetched, but this sounds like your typical Oberlin student to me. I identify as a leftist, but let's be real, this is fucking absurd. Not only is it a stretch to assert bad dining hall sushi is racist, but on a fundamental level, is this really what anyone wants to invest their energy in fighting? It's the perfect example of so-called "political correctness" run amuck.

The Obama years ushered in a series of ridiculous protests on college campuses, restarting the national conversation on political correctness. Since the rise of Donald Trump, people of all political leanings have been trying to figure out the best way to understand how political correctness influences our country's discourse. On last week's Saturday Night Live, Colin Jost joked about a new feature on Tinder that allows users to choose from 37 gender identity options, attributing Clinton's loss to this type of social progress. Jost directed critics of his joke to a recent New York Times opinion piece, where liberal historian Mark Lilla argues that the left's embrace of identity politics "has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored."

Identity politics alone didn't cost Clinton the election. "It indirectly had an impact," New York columnist Jonathan Chait—who's written extensively about the risks of P.C. culture—told me last week. Trump campaigned on an explicitly anti-P.C. platform, saying in one Republican primary debate, "I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been challenged by so many people and I don't, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time, either."

Chait said he doesn't think political correctness was why Clinton lost. Rather, "There is this phenomenon of categorizing too many things as racist or sexist, and that makes us unable to analyze and engage with Trump. I think one of the problems with that phenomenon is that on the flipside it allows people like Trump to disguise themselves—disguise their racist and sexist beliefs among a lot of other beliefs that aren't racist and sexist."

That sentiment applies to Oberlin: Dining hall cultural appropriation protests turn us into a society where serving someone low quality sushi makes you a racist. This type of discourse, then, trivializes actual racism—like Trump wanting to put Muslims on a registry—by elevating something like a petty complaint about food to the same level as other serious racist behaviors. (...)

The very concept of leftist political correctness practiced at a place like Oberlin hinges on the idea that experiences of identity-related oppression should play a major role in political discourse. It is about language, about who gets to say what, and how we communicate. It doesn't necessarily aim to limit free speech, like some critics claim, but rather impose consequences for asserting hateful ideas. The heart of the issue isn't about making sure what you say doesn't offend, but how people with radically different beliefs should best talk to each other.

Political correctness is difficult to pin down because its definition changes depending on the political orientation of the person you ask. Instead of defining what political correctness is, pundits prefer to speak in examples of the ideology gone wrong. This exposes a major hole in the way our culture thinks about political correctness: It's not quite an ideology, but instead a way to categorize an argument about social equity you disagree with. Most people don't self-identify as "politically correct."

by Eve Peyser, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Smart Garbage Can Places Amazon Orders Based On Your Trash

[ed. Hallelujah, I've been waiting for this all my life. Are we living in an age of wonder, or what?]

Amazon has continually tried to make ordering easier, especially when it comes to household items that people generally replace after using.

The company lets people order via its Echo voice assistant and it has hundreds of companies in its Dash replenishment program. The first iteration of that effort has been single-brand buttons that people put in the locations where they use the item. One push and the item is reordered through Amazon. For example, a person may have a Tide Dash button near his or her washing machine and one tied to a favorite cereal in the pantry.

Dash, however, is not solely linked to devices programmed by Amazon. The company has a number of APIs (essentially a piece of software allowing third parties access to the technology) that will bring Dash to a whole new range of products. At the core of all of them is the idea that it will make ordering from Amazon easier or even automated.

Now, a number of new companies have joined Amazon's automated replenishment program. One of those new partners makes a device to attach to your trash can that, with your help, looks at what you throw away in order to reorder those items for you.

What is a smart trash can?

GeniCan, which starts at $124.99, is an add-on sensor for trash cans. The device, which ships in January, is programmable. People simply scan the bar code of any product they want added to their replenishment list. As the smart-trash-can owner throws an item away, he or she simply needs to run the bar code past the in-can scanner to have it reordered. Or, if there is no bar code, you can add an item to your list by speaking to the machine. If you merely throw the item in the trash, it won't be added to the shopping list.

by Daniel B. Kline, Motley Fool |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

Utamaro, “Okita in the Mirror”
via:

[ed. Something else your kids will never understand. (So, like...  you had to send the cartridge away in the mail and couldn't see your pictures for a week?!) Well, yes... and sometimes even longer, but eventually you could take them to the photomart and get them processed in a couple hours. (But, but... then anyone could see them!) Umm...]
via:

Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays

[ed. Listening to some Pat clips this morning. You'll probabaly recognize this one from Fandango (one of my all time favorite movies). Here's the wedding scene at the end.]

Utopia Is Creepy

At the moment Carr started his blog, the agent of millenarian change was the internet — in particular, what enthusiasts were touting as “Web 2.0,” with its promise of universal collaboration, connectedness, and participation. User-created content like Wikis and blogs would displace the old media, and participants would ultimately congeal into a collective intelligence capable of acting on a global scale.

Carr’s blog first came to wide attention on the strength of his critique of an influential article called “We Are the Web,” by Wired’s “Senior Maverick” Kevin Kelly. Kelly wrote that the accumulation of content on the web — from music, videos, and news, to sports scores, guides, and maps — was providing a view of the world that was “spookily godlike.” By 2015, he predicted, the web would have evolved into “a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet […] and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network.” With chiliastic zeal, he announced, “There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine […] You and I are alive at this moment.” Future generations, he said, will “look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then.” Or, as Wordsworth might have put it, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be online.”

In a post called “The Amorality of Web 2.0,” Carr taxed Kelly with using a “language of rapture” that made objectivity impossible: “All the things that Web 2.0 represents — participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism — become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state.” On the contrary, he countered, those features are invariably mixed blessings. As a manifestation of the age of participation, Wikipedia is certainly useful, but it’s also slipshod, factually unreliable, and appallingly written. “It seems fair to ask,” he said, “when the intelligence in ‘collective intelligence’ will begin to manifest itself.”

Similarly with blogs: Kelly described them as part of “a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations” that turns consumers into producers. Carr, himself a blogger, pointed to the limits of the blogosphere: “its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological polarization and extremism.” In short, “Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It’s a set of technologies — a machine, not a Machine — that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption.” (...)

Looking back over the history of technological enthusiasms in his American Technological Sublime, the historian David Nye notes that, in each generation, “the radically new disappears into ordinary experience.” By now, the internet is ubiquitous, and for just that reason no longer a Thing. There are between 50 and 100 processors in a modern luxury car, about as many as there are electric motors (think power steering, seats, wipers, windows, mirrors, CD players, fans, etc.). But you wouldn’t describe the automobile as an application of either technology.

So the futurists have to keep moving the horizon. One feature that makes this era truly different is the number of labels that we’ve assigned to it. Carr himself lists “the digital age, the information age, the internet age, the computer age, the connected age, the Google age, the emoji age, the cloud age, the smartphone age, the data age, the Facebook age, the robot age”; he could have added the gamification age, the social age, the wearable age, and plenty of others. Whatever you call it, he notes, this age is tailored to the talents of the brand manager.

In his more recent posts, Carr is reacting to these varying visions of a new millennium, where the internet is taken for granted and the transformative forces are innovations like wearables, biosensors, and data analytics. The 2011 post from which he draws his title, “Utopia is creepy,” was inspired by a Microsoft “envisionment scenario.” Direct digital descendants of the World’s Fair pavilions, these are the videos that companies produce to depict a future in which their products have become ubiquitous and essential, similar to the worlds pervaded by self-driving cars or synthetics described above. The Microsoft video portrays “a not-too-distant future populated by exceedingly well-groomed people who spend their hyperproductive days going from one computer display to another.” A black-clad businesswoman walks through an airport, touches her computerized eyeglasses, and a digitized voice lights up to define a personal “pick up” zone:

As soon as she settles into the backseat the car’s windows turn into computer monitors, displaying her upcoming schedule […] [h]er phone, meanwhile, transmits her estimated time of arrival to a hotel bellhop, who tracks her approach through a screen the size of a business card.

One thing that makes these scenarios disquieting, Carr suggests, is the robotic affectlessness of the humans — who bring to mind the “uncanny valley” that unsettles us when we watch their digital replicas. These figures are the direct descendants of those audio-animatronic families that Disney designed for the 1964 World’s Fair. As technologies become the protagonists of the drama, people become props. The machines do the work — observing us, anticipating our needs or desires, and acting on what they take to be our behalf.

It’s that sense of ubiquitous presence that has made “creepy” our reflexive aesthetic reaction to the intrusiveness of new technologies — there is already a whole body of scholarly literature on the subject, with journal articles titled “On the Nature of Creepiness” and “Leakiness and Creepiness in App Space,” etc. Creepy is a more elusive notion than scary. Scary things set our imaginations racing with dire thoughts of cyberstalkers, identity thieves, or government surveillance. With creepy things, our imagination doesn’t really know where to start — there is only the unease that comes from sensing that we are the object of someone or something’s unbidden gaze.(...)

What’s most striking about these pictures of the sensor-saturated world isn’t just their creepiness, but how trivial and pedestrian they can be. The chief of Google Android touts interconnected technology that can “assist people in a meaningful way,” and then offers as an example automatically changing the music in your car to an age-appropriate selection when you pick up your kids. Microsoft’s prototype “Nudge Bra” monitors heart rate, respiration, and body movements to detect stress and, via a smart phone app, triggers “just-in-time interventions to support behavior modification for emotional eating.” (A similar application for men was judged unfeasible since their underwear was too far from the heart — “That has always been the problem,” Carr deadpans.) They’re symptomatic of Silicon Valley’s reigning assumption, writes Carr, that anything that can be automated should be automated. But automatic music programming and diet encouragement — really, is that all?

by Geoff Nunberg, LARB | Read more:
Images: Utopia is Creepy