Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Low Definition in Higher Education
Every year for nearly a decade, I’ve assigned Anna Karenina to students enrolled in my course on the novel. At more than 800 pages, Tolstoy’s saga can invite hurried reading, so a lot of class time is spent applying the brakes: “Not so fast.” “How do you know that?” “What’s it look like from her point of view?” There’s a useful speed bump in that famous first line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In its own way. Don’t assume you know who these people are, Tolstoy cautions, however familiar they may seem.
The book then proceeds to earn that caution, for what follows is a fantastic braid of self-deceptions, mistakes, and misunderstandings, all of which we see (as the characters themselves never can) from Tolstoy’s skybox of omniscience. The knowledge we’re exposed to can often seem too much—not just to take in, but to bear. Karenin’s solemn, impassive reaction to Anna’s tearful declaration of love for Vronsky, for example, seems initially to confirm Anna’s description of her husband as a mechanical functionary for whom time is a schedule and life a series of kept appointments. Only later do we learn that the dead look on Karenin’s face conceals a man so fully alive to his wife’s tears that he had to will himself inert so as not to fall apart. As happens so often in the book, just when we think we finally understand someone, Tolstoy drops a more powerful lens into the scope, or shifts its viewing angle, and we’re bewildered all over again.
I didn’t like bewilderment when I was in college, and my students don’t either. Their lives are chaotic enough without any help from books. So they’re just as inclined as I was to bypass complication as a way of preserving the clarity of their judgments, which is precisely what Tolstoy’s characters do. Anna needs to construe her husband as an unfeeling machine in order to withstand her own guilt, just as her husband needs to construe Anna as a thoroughly depraved woman so as to sharpen his own hatred. It’s one of the book’s many indelible patterns: the easiest way to streamline your feelings is to simplify the people who provoke them.
A college ought to be the ideal place to help students learn to resist such simplifications—to resist them not just inside the classroom, in the books they read, but outside in the lives they lead. Rightly understood, the campus beyond the classroom is the laboratory component of college itself. It’s where ideas and experience should meet and refine one another, where things should get more complicated, not less.
But what happens when the administrators who supervise this lab—sometimes in tandem with professors who teach the courses—pretend to have so mastered the difficult questions of race, of social justice, of meaning and intention, that they feel entitled to dictate to others? What happens when they so pixelate the subject matter that what emerges is a CliffsNotes version of human experience, the very thing that a college curriculum should be working against?
What happens is that many students will accept these simplifications. Some will even cling to them for dear life. Finally a map—with shortcuts!—and a way out of bewilderment. Feeling offended implies an offense, and where there’s an offense there must be a culprit guilty of having committed it. No need to bother with the complexities of context and intention—it says here that “impact” is what matters, that how I feel is what counts. No need to wonder whether an expression of hatred is real or a ruse, isolated or endemic—assume the worst and take the part for the whole.
But of course that’s the problem with homophobia, racism, sexism, religious extremism, and any other “ism” you care to mention. They’re shortcuts. Tell me your skin color, or your gender, whom you want to sleep with or marry, what god you worship or deny, and I’ll fill in the rest.
The epitome of shortcuts, the one to which all others aspire, is the straight line. It’s the simplest of moral geometries and the most seductive. When George Orwell was working as a policeman in Burma, he saw a man being led down just such a line on the way to the gallows. Held tightly between his two Indian guards, and with only minutes to live, the man did something extraordinary. Or rather, he did the most ordinary thing in the world. “[H]e stepped slightly aside,” Orwell tells us in “The Hanging,” “to avoid a puddle on the path.”
Did any of Orwell’s fellow officers see that swerve? Maybe. But as the efficient managers of an execution, they had reason not to see it. Their job required them to see only the condemned criminal, not the human being who didn’t want to get his feet wet. His swerve was not on the map.
There are no rules for noticing swerves. There are no lines—whether drawn in the sand or in a speech code—that will help students grasp the complexity of another person’s experience or their own. On the contrary, such lines often profile the groups they mean to describe, and deepen the mistrust they pretend to diminish. Draw up a list of microaggressions, for example, and you implicitly divide a campus into two macro-aggregates: on the one side, recklessly aggressive students who need to be constrained, and on the other, vulnerable students who need to be protected. Then, reality yields to that representation, as students start listening for rather than to: they become fearful of what they might say or hear, rather than interested in what they might say or hear. (...)
Another aspect of current undergraduate experience is at play here too—speed. It’s often said that the lives of young people today are more complicated than those of preceding generations. It’s possible, but I doubt it. In my experience, “complicated” is a consoling euphemism for “distracted.” With every acquaintance they’ve ever made, every song they’ve ever heard, and every consumer good they’ve ever imagined just a touchscreen away, students today live more distracted lives, in relation to which complexity can be an unwelcome guest, requiring as it does both focus and time. Most millennial students readily acknowledge this, even the ones rightly suspicious of other clichés about their generation. It’s hardly their fault, after all, though it is their problem, since the pressures of triage—pressures increased by the compulsory communication of social media—make them more susceptible to snap judgments and sloganeering, in the way that people on the go are more susceptible to fast food and people in crisis are more susceptible to religious dogma. (...)
Whatever its pretensions to an enlightened, progressive politics, the overarching spirit of the placemat is consumer society’s emphasis on speed and convenience. No need to think through these issues yourselves—we’ve done the thinking for you. Besides, it’s what everyone else will be thinking this fall. This covert consumerist ethos helps explain what otherwise seems especially incongruous about higher education in America today: how to square the putatively “progressive”—but in fact retrograde—imposition of speech codes, safe spaces, bias response teams, and the like on college campuses, with the simultaneous emphasis on commerce and entrepreneurship, an emphasis especially favored by the business-oriented boards of trustees. The answer is that they’re both interested in the same thing: smooth operations at any cost. Often that cost is the mission of the university itself.
It’s higher education’s version of what the British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips has called the phobia of frustration in a capitalist culture: a manic tendency to direct our states of uncertainty—moments when we might be genuinely puzzled by our desires, when we don’t know what we want or think—to an immediate source of satisfaction. Such a culture is like a conversational partner who constantly finishes your sentences for you—or rather, finishes your questions by turning them into positive declarations of beliefs and desires.
by Lyell Asher, The American Scholar | Read more:
Image: Sarah Browning/Flickr
The book then proceeds to earn that caution, for what follows is a fantastic braid of self-deceptions, mistakes, and misunderstandings, all of which we see (as the characters themselves never can) from Tolstoy’s skybox of omniscience. The knowledge we’re exposed to can often seem too much—not just to take in, but to bear. Karenin’s solemn, impassive reaction to Anna’s tearful declaration of love for Vronsky, for example, seems initially to confirm Anna’s description of her husband as a mechanical functionary for whom time is a schedule and life a series of kept appointments. Only later do we learn that the dead look on Karenin’s face conceals a man so fully alive to his wife’s tears that he had to will himself inert so as not to fall apart. As happens so often in the book, just when we think we finally understand someone, Tolstoy drops a more powerful lens into the scope, or shifts its viewing angle, and we’re bewildered all over again.I didn’t like bewilderment when I was in college, and my students don’t either. Their lives are chaotic enough without any help from books. So they’re just as inclined as I was to bypass complication as a way of preserving the clarity of their judgments, which is precisely what Tolstoy’s characters do. Anna needs to construe her husband as an unfeeling machine in order to withstand her own guilt, just as her husband needs to construe Anna as a thoroughly depraved woman so as to sharpen his own hatred. It’s one of the book’s many indelible patterns: the easiest way to streamline your feelings is to simplify the people who provoke them.
A college ought to be the ideal place to help students learn to resist such simplifications—to resist them not just inside the classroom, in the books they read, but outside in the lives they lead. Rightly understood, the campus beyond the classroom is the laboratory component of college itself. It’s where ideas and experience should meet and refine one another, where things should get more complicated, not less.
But what happens when the administrators who supervise this lab—sometimes in tandem with professors who teach the courses—pretend to have so mastered the difficult questions of race, of social justice, of meaning and intention, that they feel entitled to dictate to others? What happens when they so pixelate the subject matter that what emerges is a CliffsNotes version of human experience, the very thing that a college curriculum should be working against?
What happens is that many students will accept these simplifications. Some will even cling to them for dear life. Finally a map—with shortcuts!—and a way out of bewilderment. Feeling offended implies an offense, and where there’s an offense there must be a culprit guilty of having committed it. No need to bother with the complexities of context and intention—it says here that “impact” is what matters, that how I feel is what counts. No need to wonder whether an expression of hatred is real or a ruse, isolated or endemic—assume the worst and take the part for the whole.
But of course that’s the problem with homophobia, racism, sexism, religious extremism, and any other “ism” you care to mention. They’re shortcuts. Tell me your skin color, or your gender, whom you want to sleep with or marry, what god you worship or deny, and I’ll fill in the rest.
The epitome of shortcuts, the one to which all others aspire, is the straight line. It’s the simplest of moral geometries and the most seductive. When George Orwell was working as a policeman in Burma, he saw a man being led down just such a line on the way to the gallows. Held tightly between his two Indian guards, and with only minutes to live, the man did something extraordinary. Or rather, he did the most ordinary thing in the world. “[H]e stepped slightly aside,” Orwell tells us in “The Hanging,” “to avoid a puddle on the path.”
Did any of Orwell’s fellow officers see that swerve? Maybe. But as the efficient managers of an execution, they had reason not to see it. Their job required them to see only the condemned criminal, not the human being who didn’t want to get his feet wet. His swerve was not on the map.
There are no rules for noticing swerves. There are no lines—whether drawn in the sand or in a speech code—that will help students grasp the complexity of another person’s experience or their own. On the contrary, such lines often profile the groups they mean to describe, and deepen the mistrust they pretend to diminish. Draw up a list of microaggressions, for example, and you implicitly divide a campus into two macro-aggregates: on the one side, recklessly aggressive students who need to be constrained, and on the other, vulnerable students who need to be protected. Then, reality yields to that representation, as students start listening for rather than to: they become fearful of what they might say or hear, rather than interested in what they might say or hear. (...)
Another aspect of current undergraduate experience is at play here too—speed. It’s often said that the lives of young people today are more complicated than those of preceding generations. It’s possible, but I doubt it. In my experience, “complicated” is a consoling euphemism for “distracted.” With every acquaintance they’ve ever made, every song they’ve ever heard, and every consumer good they’ve ever imagined just a touchscreen away, students today live more distracted lives, in relation to which complexity can be an unwelcome guest, requiring as it does both focus and time. Most millennial students readily acknowledge this, even the ones rightly suspicious of other clichés about their generation. It’s hardly their fault, after all, though it is their problem, since the pressures of triage—pressures increased by the compulsory communication of social media—make them more susceptible to snap judgments and sloganeering, in the way that people on the go are more susceptible to fast food and people in crisis are more susceptible to religious dogma. (...)
Whatever its pretensions to an enlightened, progressive politics, the overarching spirit of the placemat is consumer society’s emphasis on speed and convenience. No need to think through these issues yourselves—we’ve done the thinking for you. Besides, it’s what everyone else will be thinking this fall. This covert consumerist ethos helps explain what otherwise seems especially incongruous about higher education in America today: how to square the putatively “progressive”—but in fact retrograde—imposition of speech codes, safe spaces, bias response teams, and the like on college campuses, with the simultaneous emphasis on commerce and entrepreneurship, an emphasis especially favored by the business-oriented boards of trustees. The answer is that they’re both interested in the same thing: smooth operations at any cost. Often that cost is the mission of the university itself.
It’s higher education’s version of what the British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips has called the phobia of frustration in a capitalist culture: a manic tendency to direct our states of uncertainty—moments when we might be genuinely puzzled by our desires, when we don’t know what we want or think—to an immediate source of satisfaction. Such a culture is like a conversational partner who constantly finishes your sentences for you—or rather, finishes your questions by turning them into positive declarations of beliefs and desires.
by Lyell Asher, The American Scholar | Read more:
Image: Sarah Browning/Flickr
Teaching Kids Philosophy Makes Them Smarter in Math and English
[ed. I'm all behind this. It reminds me of one of my favorite films Blue is the Warmest Color. Most of the story is devoted to the relationship between Adele and Emma, but I found the classroom scenes equally fascinating (Adele as student, and later a teacher herself). The focus on philosophy and ethics and connections and cultural diversity helped children become thinking people rather than simple regurgitation machines. I'd love to find a set of philosophy/ethics-based children's books that I could recommend.]
Schools face relentless pressure to up their offerings in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math. Few are making the case for philosophy.
Maybe they should.
Nine- and 10-year-old children in England who participated in a philosophy class once a week over the course of a year significantly boosted their math and literacy skills, with disadvantaged students showing the most significant gains, according to a large and well-designed study (pdf).
More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas.
Kids who took the course increased math and reading scores by the equivalent of two extra months of teaching, even though the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others. (...)
The beneficial effects of philosophy lasted for two years, with the intervention group continuing to outperform the control group long after the classes had finished. “They had been given new ways of thinking and expressing themselves,”said Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF. “They had been thinking with more logic and more connected ideas.”
England is not the first country to experiment with teaching kids philosophy. The program the EEF used, called P4C (philosophy for children), was designed by professor Matthew Lippman in New Jersey in the 1970s to teach thinking skills through philosophical dialog. In 1992, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE) was set up in the UK to emulate that work. P4C has been adopted by schools in 60 countries.
SAPERE’s program does not focus on reading the texts of Plato and Kant, but rather stories, poems, or film clips that prompt discussions about philosophical issues. The goal is to help children reason, formulate and ask questions, engage in constructive conversation, and develop arguments.
by Jenny Anderson, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Blue is the Warmest Color, Univeral Pictures
Schools face relentless pressure to up their offerings in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math. Few are making the case for philosophy.
Maybe they should.
Nine- and 10-year-old children in England who participated in a philosophy class once a week over the course of a year significantly boosted their math and literacy skills, with disadvantaged students showing the most significant gains, according to a large and well-designed study (pdf).
More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas.Kids who took the course increased math and reading scores by the equivalent of two extra months of teaching, even though the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others. (...)
The beneficial effects of philosophy lasted for two years, with the intervention group continuing to outperform the control group long after the classes had finished. “They had been given new ways of thinking and expressing themselves,”said Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF. “They had been thinking with more logic and more connected ideas.”
England is not the first country to experiment with teaching kids philosophy. The program the EEF used, called P4C (philosophy for children), was designed by professor Matthew Lippman in New Jersey in the 1970s to teach thinking skills through philosophical dialog. In 1992, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE) was set up in the UK to emulate that work. P4C has been adopted by schools in 60 countries.
SAPERE’s program does not focus on reading the texts of Plato and Kant, but rather stories, poems, or film clips that prompt discussions about philosophical issues. The goal is to help children reason, formulate and ask questions, engage in constructive conversation, and develop arguments.
by Jenny Anderson, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Blue is the Warmest Color, Univeral Pictures
Let Them Drink Blood
Silicon Valley’s elites are a revolutionary vanguard party developing the not-too-distant future of cybernetic capitalist reconstruction. Despite cultish personas and massive social influence, however, they tend to keep their politics on the low. That changed this year when Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and Facebook board member, who also has investments in SpaceX and data analysis firm Palantir, revealed himself as mastermind of the litigious assassination of Gawker, a fellow-traveler of right-libertarian White Nationalists, and a prominent supporter of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Thiel’s “Don’t Be Evil” competitors now look like saints in comparison. Some colleagues distanced themselves, while others wrote off the endorsement as part of his “disruptive instinct” to break down regulations preventing his Founders Fund investments from expanding. Then, in August, it was rumored that Thiel bragged to friends that Trump promised to nominate him to the Supreme Court, which would make him one of the most powerful men in America for a lifetime term. And Peter Thiel plans to live for a long time. He has a personal and financial stake in life extension technologies, including “parabiosis”–the (theoretically) rejuvenating transfer of young blood to an older person.
For those outside the valley, Thiel’s vampiric ambitions appeared to vindicate populist imagery dating back to Voltaire, who wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary that the real vampires were “stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight.” A century of trite political cartoons have depicted moguls or aristocrats growing fat on the blood of innocents. Most recently, Matt Taibbi’s popular description of Goldman Sachs as a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” revivified this discourse as a conceptual rallying point of Occupy Wall Street. It was a sentiment that even played out in the campaigns of Sanders, and to a far worse extent, Trump, who towards the end of his campaign regularly parroted Infowars radio host Alex Jones’s discourse about a world-dominating conspiracy of shadowy globalists.
“Elites around the world have been obsessed with blood for thousands of years,” Jones said in an Infowars video this summer concerning Thiel. He goes on to argue that elites throughout history, including the British Royal Family, have undergone similar parabiotic treatments for decades. “Where the story really gets weird,” Jones opined, “is that Prince Charles came out in the last decade and said I am a direct descendent of Vlad the Impaler… the people running things aren’t physical, immortal vampires, but they have the spirit of what you describe as a vampire, and they believe their god, Lucifer, if they establish a world government, is going to give them eternal life. And now they’re mainlining the idea of baby parts and blood from the young to make the rich live longer.”
Dropping in Dracula’s relation to the British Monarchy would be irrelevant for a journalist, but for a conspiracist like Jones, the detail is delicious enough to aid both his legitimate thesis–that the rich and powerful treat the world’s populations as nothing but commodities–and the farfetched one: Thiel, despite being a fellow traveler of Jones’ paleoconservatism, is an early adopter of technology that would free him from the eternal hellfire he would otherwise be due through his deals with the devil. Jones warns that Thiel’s fellow globalists will continue to push wars, cancer-causing vaccines, and abortions in a eugenic blood-ritual to depopulate the world by 80% and install a one-world government.
Thiel’s visionary investments suggest a similar blurring of science fiction, paranoia, and plausible dystopian scenarios. In a 2009 essay for Cato Unbound, he stated his anti-national principles: “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”
So what’s standing in the way of a “death and taxes”-optional world? The same thing that fellow frontier industrialist Daniel Plainview lamented in 2007’s There Will Be Blood: People. Poor and female ones, specifically. “Since 1920,” Thiel continued, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women–two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians–have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” (...)
Thiel views the world much like the early Soviet futurists. Their utopian dreams ran far ahead of the chaos of revolutionary Russia, where Civil War and social upheaval posed a significant impediment to the development of the Soviet Union’s productive forces. Our own era of bicameral stagnation, social unrest, and organized labor similarly threaten the reactionary acceleration envisioned by Silicon Valley futurists, who are developing technology to eliminate rebellion through expansion of the carceral state, scientific breakthroughs to protect the wealthiest from irreversible environmental depletion, and a new relationship between life and death mediated by the dead labor of capitalism.
Organs, blood, or stem cells may soon be freely traded like an Uber for Sein-zum-Tode (although, with scant evidence that life extension is anything other than pseudoscience, it’s more likely to be a Theranos for Thanatos). For the middle class, extra years of life will be purchasable in mortgage-like installments. Life extension will be distributed just like the resiliency plans of major population areas under the menace of natural disasters amplified by global warming. The wealthiest areas will fortify structures, raise sea-walls, and afford for evacuations, while places like Haiti and Bangladesh are doomed to drown. Dying will increasingly be viewed as a manageable epidemic, like AIDS, violent crime, or homelessness.
Mars is even more open to the whims of venture capitalists who talk about it as if it’s a cold red stress-ball for the worst mistakes of humanity. The most commonly discussed technique for making the planet habitable involves exporting global warming to Mars by building robotic factories that produce nothing but greenhouse gases, thus melting the ice caps and making the atmosphere more like that of Earth. Elon Musk had one other idea: nuking it.
Thiel’s “Don’t Be Evil” competitors now look like saints in comparison. Some colleagues distanced themselves, while others wrote off the endorsement as part of his “disruptive instinct” to break down regulations preventing his Founders Fund investments from expanding. Then, in August, it was rumored that Thiel bragged to friends that Trump promised to nominate him to the Supreme Court, which would make him one of the most powerful men in America for a lifetime term. And Peter Thiel plans to live for a long time. He has a personal and financial stake in life extension technologies, including “parabiosis”–the (theoretically) rejuvenating transfer of young blood to an older person.
For those outside the valley, Thiel’s vampiric ambitions appeared to vindicate populist imagery dating back to Voltaire, who wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary that the real vampires were “stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight.” A century of trite political cartoons have depicted moguls or aristocrats growing fat on the blood of innocents. Most recently, Matt Taibbi’s popular description of Goldman Sachs as a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” revivified this discourse as a conceptual rallying point of Occupy Wall Street. It was a sentiment that even played out in the campaigns of Sanders, and to a far worse extent, Trump, who towards the end of his campaign regularly parroted Infowars radio host Alex Jones’s discourse about a world-dominating conspiracy of shadowy globalists.“Elites around the world have been obsessed with blood for thousands of years,” Jones said in an Infowars video this summer concerning Thiel. He goes on to argue that elites throughout history, including the British Royal Family, have undergone similar parabiotic treatments for decades. “Where the story really gets weird,” Jones opined, “is that Prince Charles came out in the last decade and said I am a direct descendent of Vlad the Impaler… the people running things aren’t physical, immortal vampires, but they have the spirit of what you describe as a vampire, and they believe their god, Lucifer, if they establish a world government, is going to give them eternal life. And now they’re mainlining the idea of baby parts and blood from the young to make the rich live longer.”
Dropping in Dracula’s relation to the British Monarchy would be irrelevant for a journalist, but for a conspiracist like Jones, the detail is delicious enough to aid both his legitimate thesis–that the rich and powerful treat the world’s populations as nothing but commodities–and the farfetched one: Thiel, despite being a fellow traveler of Jones’ paleoconservatism, is an early adopter of technology that would free him from the eternal hellfire he would otherwise be due through his deals with the devil. Jones warns that Thiel’s fellow globalists will continue to push wars, cancer-causing vaccines, and abortions in a eugenic blood-ritual to depopulate the world by 80% and install a one-world government.
Thiel’s visionary investments suggest a similar blurring of science fiction, paranoia, and plausible dystopian scenarios. In a 2009 essay for Cato Unbound, he stated his anti-national principles: “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”
So what’s standing in the way of a “death and taxes”-optional world? The same thing that fellow frontier industrialist Daniel Plainview lamented in 2007’s There Will Be Blood: People. Poor and female ones, specifically. “Since 1920,” Thiel continued, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women–two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians–have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” (...)
Thiel views the world much like the early Soviet futurists. Their utopian dreams ran far ahead of the chaos of revolutionary Russia, where Civil War and social upheaval posed a significant impediment to the development of the Soviet Union’s productive forces. Our own era of bicameral stagnation, social unrest, and organized labor similarly threaten the reactionary acceleration envisioned by Silicon Valley futurists, who are developing technology to eliminate rebellion through expansion of the carceral state, scientific breakthroughs to protect the wealthiest from irreversible environmental depletion, and a new relationship between life and death mediated by the dead labor of capitalism.
Organs, blood, or stem cells may soon be freely traded like an Uber for Sein-zum-Tode (although, with scant evidence that life extension is anything other than pseudoscience, it’s more likely to be a Theranos for Thanatos). For the middle class, extra years of life will be purchasable in mortgage-like installments. Life extension will be distributed just like the resiliency plans of major population areas under the menace of natural disasters amplified by global warming. The wealthiest areas will fortify structures, raise sea-walls, and afford for evacuations, while places like Haiti and Bangladesh are doomed to drown. Dying will increasingly be viewed as a manageable epidemic, like AIDS, violent crime, or homelessness.
Mars is even more open to the whims of venture capitalists who talk about it as if it’s a cold red stress-ball for the worst mistakes of humanity. The most commonly discussed technique for making the planet habitable involves exporting global warming to Mars by building robotic factories that produce nothing but greenhouse gases, thus melting the ice caps and making the atmosphere more like that of Earth. Elon Musk had one other idea: nuking it.
by A.M. Gittlitz, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
How to Get the Most Out of Your Amazon Prime Membership
Since it first appeared back in 2005 as a way of getting faster shipping all year round, Amazon Prime has grown to be a premium members' club with a whole host of added benefits and goodies to enjoy.
As well as speedier deliveries, a subscription now gets you access to Amazon Prime Music and Amazon Prime Video, special offers, ebook loans, unlimited photo storage in the cloud, Dash buttons and even takeaway food.
The number of bonuses keeps on growing - and here's how you can make sure you're getting the maximum value out of your £79 (or $99) a year.
Signing up for Amazon Prime
If you've not yet signed up for Amazon Prime, the good news is you don't even have to pay anything straight away, because everyone gets a 30-day free trial to test out the benefits.
Log into Amazon and you should see Prime advertised somewhere; if not, you can visit the landing pages for both the UK and US sites.
Click through on the 30-day trial offer and, as you're already logged in and Amazon already has your details, you'll be up and running very quickly. If you don't have an Amazon account yet, you can of course sign up for one.
Straight away you'll be taken to a landing page where some of the best perks of Amazon Prime are shown off - click on anything that looks interesting.
Faster deliveries forever
This is the whole reason Amazon Prime started in the first place: unlimited one-day delivery (two-day in the US), so you can get your Amazon items as fast as possible without paying a premium for quick postage each time. If you order a lot of stuff from the site, the savings can quickly eclipse the money you've forked out for a monthly or yearly subscription.
Stick anything you like in your Amazon basket and head to the checkout to see if Prime can help you out - on many products, the expedited delivery option is selected at no extra charge, though this can vary between items, suppliers and locations.
In some parts of the UK and US you might find the even faster Prime Now is an option. Deliveries can arrive within the hour though you'll often have to pay extra for that.
There's also another choice: the no-rush delivery option. If your delivery can wait a few days, that obviously helps Amazon out, and you'll be rewarded with a small digital credit you can use towards something else. (...)
Amazon Prime Music
Amazon Prime Music may not have the high profile of Spotify or Apple Music but it's a decent music streaming service in its own right.
As with video, your web browser is a good way into the service - follow the Prime Music link from the Prime front page and you're up and running. You'll see straight away that music you've ordered from Amazon in the past, whether in digital or physical format, is already available to listen to.
There are dedicated apps available for iOS and Android, and you can access the service through your Amazon Echo or your Sonos speakers too. You can import your own songs from your computer as well - the maximum is 250 tracks before an extra payment is triggered, but digital music bought straight from Amazon doesn't count against the limit.
You might also want to consider Amazon Music Unlimited, which gives you millions more songs to stream on demand without purchase, and which costs an extra £7.99 or $7.99 a month for Prime members.
by David Nield, Techradar | Read more:
Image: uncredited
As well as speedier deliveries, a subscription now gets you access to Amazon Prime Music and Amazon Prime Video, special offers, ebook loans, unlimited photo storage in the cloud, Dash buttons and even takeaway food.
The number of bonuses keeps on growing - and here's how you can make sure you're getting the maximum value out of your £79 (or $99) a year.
Signing up for Amazon Prime
If you've not yet signed up for Amazon Prime, the good news is you don't even have to pay anything straight away, because everyone gets a 30-day free trial to test out the benefits.Log into Amazon and you should see Prime advertised somewhere; if not, you can visit the landing pages for both the UK and US sites.
Click through on the 30-day trial offer and, as you're already logged in and Amazon already has your details, you'll be up and running very quickly. If you don't have an Amazon account yet, you can of course sign up for one.
Straight away you'll be taken to a landing page where some of the best perks of Amazon Prime are shown off - click on anything that looks interesting.
Faster deliveries forever
This is the whole reason Amazon Prime started in the first place: unlimited one-day delivery (two-day in the US), so you can get your Amazon items as fast as possible without paying a premium for quick postage each time. If you order a lot of stuff from the site, the savings can quickly eclipse the money you've forked out for a monthly or yearly subscription.
Stick anything you like in your Amazon basket and head to the checkout to see if Prime can help you out - on many products, the expedited delivery option is selected at no extra charge, though this can vary between items, suppliers and locations.
In some parts of the UK and US you might find the even faster Prime Now is an option. Deliveries can arrive within the hour though you'll often have to pay extra for that.
There's also another choice: the no-rush delivery option. If your delivery can wait a few days, that obviously helps Amazon out, and you'll be rewarded with a small digital credit you can use towards something else. (...)
Amazon Prime Music
Amazon Prime Music may not have the high profile of Spotify or Apple Music but it's a decent music streaming service in its own right.
As with video, your web browser is a good way into the service - follow the Prime Music link from the Prime front page and you're up and running. You'll see straight away that music you've ordered from Amazon in the past, whether in digital or physical format, is already available to listen to.
There are dedicated apps available for iOS and Android, and you can access the service through your Amazon Echo or your Sonos speakers too. You can import your own songs from your computer as well - the maximum is 250 tracks before an extra payment is triggered, but digital music bought straight from Amazon doesn't count against the limit.
You might also want to consider Amazon Music Unlimited, which gives you millions more songs to stream on demand without purchase, and which costs an extra £7.99 or $7.99 a month for Prime members.
Image: uncredited
The Crisis of Market Fundamentalism
The biggest political surprise of 2016 was that everyone was so surprised. I certainly had no excuse to be caught unawares: soon after the 2008 crisis, I wrote a book suggesting that a collapse of confidence in political institutions would follow the economic collapse, with a lag of five years or so.
We’ve seen this sequence before. The first breakdown of globalization, described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their 1848 The Communist Manifesto, was followed by reform laws creating unprecedented rights for the working class. The breakdown of British imperialism after World War I was followed by the New Deal and the welfare state. And the breakdown of Keynesian economics after 1968 was followed by the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. In my book Capitalism 4.0, I argued that comparable political upheavals would follow the fourth systemic breakdown of global capitalism heralded by the 2008 crisis.
When a particular model of capitalism is working successfully, material progress relieves political pressures. But when the economy fails – and the failure is not just a transient phase but a symptom of deep contradictions – capitalism’s disruptive social side effects can turn politically toxic.
That is what happened after 2008. Once the failure of free trade, deregulation, and monetarism came to be seen as leading to a “new normal” of permanent austerity and diminished expectations, rather than just to a temporary banking crisis, the inequalities, job losses, and cultural dislocations of the pre-crisis period could no longer be legitimized – just as the extortionate taxes of the 1950s and 1960s lost their legitimacy in the stagflation of the 1970s.
If we are witnessing this kind of transformation, then piecemeal reformers who try to address specific grievances about immigration, trade, or income inequality will lose out to radical politicians who challenge the entire system. And, in some ways, the radicals will be right.
The disappearance of “good” manufacturing jobs cannot be blamed on immigration, trade, or technology. But whereas these vectors of economic competition increase total national income, they do not necessarily distribute income gains in a socially acceptable way. To do that requires deliberate political intervention on at least two fronts.
First, macroeconomic management must ensure that demand always grows as strongly as the supply potential created by technology and globalization. This is the fundamental Keynesian insight that was temporarily rejected in the heyday of monetarism during the early 1980s, successfully reinstated in the 1990s (at least in the US and Britain), but then forgotten again in the deficit panic after 2009.
A return to Keynesian demand management could be the main economic benefit of Donald Trump’s incoming US administration, as expansionary fiscal policies replace much less efficient efforts at monetary stimulus. The US may now be ready to abandon the monetarist dogmas of central-bank independence and inflation targeting, and to restore full employment as the top priority of demand management. For Europe, however, this revolution in macroeconomic thinking is still years away.
At the same time, a second, more momentous, intellectual revolution will be needed regarding government intervention in social outcomes and economic structures. Market fundamentalism conceals a profound contradiction. Free trade, technological progress, and other forces that promote economic “efficiency” are presented as beneficial to society, even if they harm individual workers or businesses, because growing national incomes allow winners to compensate losers, ensuring that nobody is left worse off.
This principle of so-called Pareto optimality underlies all moral claims for free-market economics. Liberalizing policies are justified in theory only by the assumption that political decisions will redistribute some of the gains from winners to losers in socially acceptable ways. But what happens if politicians do the opposite in practice?
By deregulating finance and trade, intensifying competition, and weakening unions, governments created the theoretical conditions that demanded redistribution from winners to losers. But advocates of market fundamentalism did not just forget redistribution; they forbade it.
The pretext was that taxes, welfare payments, and other government interventions impair incentives and distort competition, reducing economic growth for society as a whole. But, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “[…] there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” By focusing on the social benefits of competition while ignoring the costs to specific people, the market fundamentalists disregarded the principle of individualism at the heart of their own ideology.
After this year’s political upheavals, the fatal contradiction between social benefits and individual losses can no longer be ignored. If trade, competition, and technological progress are to power the next phase of capitalism, they will have to be paired with government interventions to redistribute the gains from growth in ways that Thatcher and Reagan declared taboo.
by Anatole Kaletsky, Project Syndicate | Read more:
We’ve seen this sequence before. The first breakdown of globalization, described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their 1848 The Communist Manifesto, was followed by reform laws creating unprecedented rights for the working class. The breakdown of British imperialism after World War I was followed by the New Deal and the welfare state. And the breakdown of Keynesian economics after 1968 was followed by the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. In my book Capitalism 4.0, I argued that comparable political upheavals would follow the fourth systemic breakdown of global capitalism heralded by the 2008 crisis.
When a particular model of capitalism is working successfully, material progress relieves political pressures. But when the economy fails – and the failure is not just a transient phase but a symptom of deep contradictions – capitalism’s disruptive social side effects can turn politically toxic.
That is what happened after 2008. Once the failure of free trade, deregulation, and monetarism came to be seen as leading to a “new normal” of permanent austerity and diminished expectations, rather than just to a temporary banking crisis, the inequalities, job losses, and cultural dislocations of the pre-crisis period could no longer be legitimized – just as the extortionate taxes of the 1950s and 1960s lost their legitimacy in the stagflation of the 1970s.
If we are witnessing this kind of transformation, then piecemeal reformers who try to address specific grievances about immigration, trade, or income inequality will lose out to radical politicians who challenge the entire system. And, in some ways, the radicals will be right.
The disappearance of “good” manufacturing jobs cannot be blamed on immigration, trade, or technology. But whereas these vectors of economic competition increase total national income, they do not necessarily distribute income gains in a socially acceptable way. To do that requires deliberate political intervention on at least two fronts.
First, macroeconomic management must ensure that demand always grows as strongly as the supply potential created by technology and globalization. This is the fundamental Keynesian insight that was temporarily rejected in the heyday of monetarism during the early 1980s, successfully reinstated in the 1990s (at least in the US and Britain), but then forgotten again in the deficit panic after 2009.
A return to Keynesian demand management could be the main economic benefit of Donald Trump’s incoming US administration, as expansionary fiscal policies replace much less efficient efforts at monetary stimulus. The US may now be ready to abandon the monetarist dogmas of central-bank independence and inflation targeting, and to restore full employment as the top priority of demand management. For Europe, however, this revolution in macroeconomic thinking is still years away.
At the same time, a second, more momentous, intellectual revolution will be needed regarding government intervention in social outcomes and economic structures. Market fundamentalism conceals a profound contradiction. Free trade, technological progress, and other forces that promote economic “efficiency” are presented as beneficial to society, even if they harm individual workers or businesses, because growing national incomes allow winners to compensate losers, ensuring that nobody is left worse off.
This principle of so-called Pareto optimality underlies all moral claims for free-market economics. Liberalizing policies are justified in theory only by the assumption that political decisions will redistribute some of the gains from winners to losers in socially acceptable ways. But what happens if politicians do the opposite in practice?
By deregulating finance and trade, intensifying competition, and weakening unions, governments created the theoretical conditions that demanded redistribution from winners to losers. But advocates of market fundamentalism did not just forget redistribution; they forbade it.
The pretext was that taxes, welfare payments, and other government interventions impair incentives and distort competition, reducing economic growth for society as a whole. But, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “[…] there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” By focusing on the social benefits of competition while ignoring the costs to specific people, the market fundamentalists disregarded the principle of individualism at the heart of their own ideology.
After this year’s political upheavals, the fatal contradiction between social benefits and individual losses can no longer be ignored. If trade, competition, and technological progress are to power the next phase of capitalism, they will have to be paired with government interventions to redistribute the gains from growth in ways that Thatcher and Reagan declared taboo.
by Anatole Kaletsky, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories
He was a legend, a virtuoso, one of the true gods of music. But he was also (at times, anyway) a person in the world like anyone else. He liked to send goofy Internet memes to his friends. He made really good scrambled eggs. He rode his bike a lot, went to the hardware store, called old friends late at night. Chris Heath spoke with band members, fellow artists, and Paisley Park veterans about the life and times of Prince Rogers Nelson—the real Prince, the man so few people got to know before he was gone.
“Really, I’m normal. A little highly strung, maybe. But normal. But so much has been written about me and people never know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’d rather let them stay confused.” — Prince, 2004
Corey Tollefson (Minneapolis-based entrepreneur and fan; attended events at Paisley Park for over 20 years): The thing that was funny was you never saw Prince [first], you smelled him. He always smelled like lavender. And you knew when he was there because you'd turn around and go, "Holy shit, I smell Prince." And then, ten seconds later, you'd see him.
Kandace Springs (singer; befriended by Prince via Twitter after he discovered her cover of a Sam Smith song online in 2014): He smelled like lavender. Dude, I'm not even kidding you. Overtime. My sister burns lavender in my house and I'm, "Oh God, it smells like Paisley Park." That's Prince.
Maya Washington (photographer; befriended by Prince after he discovered her online in 2014): Before you meet him, you have the idea of him being this thing: He's untouchable, he's a unicorn, he's a meta-planet. So the first thing I was taken aback by, and a lot of people are taken aback by, is his size. Because I'm short, I'm five three…and he's shorter than me. But, that aside, he is a unicorn. He's somehow floating when he's talking.
Morris Hayes (keyboard player; Prince's longest-serving band member, 1992–2012): I remember taking him to the hardware store in my camping van. He wanted to go buy a lock. And we go to Ace Hardware—it's snowing and freezing—and I say, "Okay, Prince, you stay in the car." So I'm picking stuff up in the aisles, I look over, he just cruises by in a turtleneck sweater and his fuzzy boots, and people are looking like, "Oh my God, Prince is in the hardware store!" He comes and finds me and he's got a handful of crap—like, "Can we buy this?" I'm, "What did you do with the car?" He says, "It's out there—it's just running." I said, "Prince, you can't leave the car running—somebody could just steal the car." He said, "This is Chanhassen—nobody's gonna steal the car." So we get out to the car and sure enough it's out there, just running, smoke coming out of the tailpipe. And he's like, "I told you." (...)
Ian Boxill (engineer at Paisley Park, 2004–09): Even when he was dressed down, he'd dress like Prince: three-inch-tall flip-flops, or these heels with lights—they'd light up when he walked. That was his comfortable clothing. He had no pockets. You know, if you got people around that can carry phones and money for you, you can get away with that. No pockets and no watch. If he needed to use a phone he'd use my phone or a driver's phone.
Hayes: We have a thing called Caribou Coffee in Minnesota, which is like Starbucks. He'd go over there, and he didn't have any pockets. He didn't have a wallet or any credit cards. He just had cash he'd carry in his hand—like, a $100 bill. And whoever took his order, they'd have a good day, 'cause he'd buy his coffee drink and then just leave the whole hundred. He doesn't wait for any change because he doesn't have anywhere to put it.
Van Jones: He was very interested in the world. He wanted me to explain how the White House worked. He asked very detailed kind of foreign-policy questions. And then he'd ask, "Why doesn't Obama just outlaw birthdays?" [laughs] I'm, like, "What?" He said, "I was hoping that Obama, as soon as he was elected, would get up and announce there'd be no more Christmas presents and no more birthdays—we've got too much to do." I said, "Yeah, I don't know if that would go over too well."
Tollefson: In the'90s he wouldn't walk anywhere, even within Paisley Park, without a bodyguard. And then I'd say around 2010…I'm not going to say he stopped caring; he stopped being over the top. He just didn't give a shit. He just walked around and he talked to people. He was always smiling. He'd bring people in, we'd have listening sessions at Paisley.
Hayes: I took him to the bike store and I bought him a bike because he said he wanted a bicycle. I got him all sized up for it, and then I told him, "Okay, Prince, I'm only buying this bike if you get a helmet." And he said, "I don't want a helmet." I said, "Well, I'm not buying this bike, sir, if you don't get a helmet—you have to ride with a helmet or else I can't be responsible for you being on this bike." He says, "Well, I don't want a helmet." I said, "I'll get you a cool one—and I'll get one, too." So we got the helmets, but I found out later that he was riding the bike and he didn't wear it.
Tollefson: There's an arboretum, literally down the street from Paisley. And during the day he'd ride his mountain bike around town, and nobody would bother him. (...)
Electra: I don't know one beautiful woman who didn't want to be with him. But it did hurt me. It hurt me really bad. And I was too young to really communicate with him, so I just kind of pulled away. And during that time I went out with a guy—I hadn't slept with this person—and Prince found out. He said, "I wrote this song about you," and then he played "I Hate U." It was hard to hear. And it was even harder to hear the parts of the song that said it could have been a completely different way. Then to say, "I hate you because I love you"—I literally cried in front of him. I think he just wanted me to hear it and know that he was really upset. Then he flew me back to Los Angeles.
Glover: I had a boyfriend at the time. That was one thing [Prince] respected. They actually played basketball together. He was, "It's nice to meet you, man—I heard a lot about you." I told him, "That's the stupidest thing you could say! Everybody's heard a lot about Prince!"
Jill Jones: With him it was kind of like Groundhog Day. A repetition. He'd drive to his dad, he'd see his mom—those were the same introductory things and they never changed, no matter what woman came in. They all took the 6 A.M. drive. And the late-night things—I don't think I was the only one to say that Prince threw rocks or came and picked them up in the middle of the night. You'd go to a record store, you'd watch some movies, you'd make some popcorn. He was definitely a creature of habit.
“Really, I’m normal. A little highly strung, maybe. But normal. But so much has been written about me and people never know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’d rather let them stay confused.” — Prince, 2004
Corey Tollefson (Minneapolis-based entrepreneur and fan; attended events at Paisley Park for over 20 years): The thing that was funny was you never saw Prince [first], you smelled him. He always smelled like lavender. And you knew when he was there because you'd turn around and go, "Holy shit, I smell Prince." And then, ten seconds later, you'd see him.
Kandace Springs (singer; befriended by Prince via Twitter after he discovered her cover of a Sam Smith song online in 2014): He smelled like lavender. Dude, I'm not even kidding you. Overtime. My sister burns lavender in my house and I'm, "Oh God, it smells like Paisley Park." That's Prince.Maya Washington (photographer; befriended by Prince after he discovered her online in 2014): Before you meet him, you have the idea of him being this thing: He's untouchable, he's a unicorn, he's a meta-planet. So the first thing I was taken aback by, and a lot of people are taken aback by, is his size. Because I'm short, I'm five three…and he's shorter than me. But, that aside, he is a unicorn. He's somehow floating when he's talking.
Morris Hayes (keyboard player; Prince's longest-serving band member, 1992–2012): I remember taking him to the hardware store in my camping van. He wanted to go buy a lock. And we go to Ace Hardware—it's snowing and freezing—and I say, "Okay, Prince, you stay in the car." So I'm picking stuff up in the aisles, I look over, he just cruises by in a turtleneck sweater and his fuzzy boots, and people are looking like, "Oh my God, Prince is in the hardware store!" He comes and finds me and he's got a handful of crap—like, "Can we buy this?" I'm, "What did you do with the car?" He says, "It's out there—it's just running." I said, "Prince, you can't leave the car running—somebody could just steal the car." He said, "This is Chanhassen—nobody's gonna steal the car." So we get out to the car and sure enough it's out there, just running, smoke coming out of the tailpipe. And he's like, "I told you." (...)
Ian Boxill (engineer at Paisley Park, 2004–09): Even when he was dressed down, he'd dress like Prince: three-inch-tall flip-flops, or these heels with lights—they'd light up when he walked. That was his comfortable clothing. He had no pockets. You know, if you got people around that can carry phones and money for you, you can get away with that. No pockets and no watch. If he needed to use a phone he'd use my phone or a driver's phone.
Hayes: We have a thing called Caribou Coffee in Minnesota, which is like Starbucks. He'd go over there, and he didn't have any pockets. He didn't have a wallet or any credit cards. He just had cash he'd carry in his hand—like, a $100 bill. And whoever took his order, they'd have a good day, 'cause he'd buy his coffee drink and then just leave the whole hundred. He doesn't wait for any change because he doesn't have anywhere to put it.
Van Jones: He was very interested in the world. He wanted me to explain how the White House worked. He asked very detailed kind of foreign-policy questions. And then he'd ask, "Why doesn't Obama just outlaw birthdays?" [laughs] I'm, like, "What?" He said, "I was hoping that Obama, as soon as he was elected, would get up and announce there'd be no more Christmas presents and no more birthdays—we've got too much to do." I said, "Yeah, I don't know if that would go over too well."
Tollefson: In the'90s he wouldn't walk anywhere, even within Paisley Park, without a bodyguard. And then I'd say around 2010…I'm not going to say he stopped caring; he stopped being over the top. He just didn't give a shit. He just walked around and he talked to people. He was always smiling. He'd bring people in, we'd have listening sessions at Paisley.
Hayes: I took him to the bike store and I bought him a bike because he said he wanted a bicycle. I got him all sized up for it, and then I told him, "Okay, Prince, I'm only buying this bike if you get a helmet." And he said, "I don't want a helmet." I said, "Well, I'm not buying this bike, sir, if you don't get a helmet—you have to ride with a helmet or else I can't be responsible for you being on this bike." He says, "Well, I don't want a helmet." I said, "I'll get you a cool one—and I'll get one, too." So we got the helmets, but I found out later that he was riding the bike and he didn't wear it.
Tollefson: There's an arboretum, literally down the street from Paisley. And during the day he'd ride his mountain bike around town, and nobody would bother him. (...)
Electra: I don't know one beautiful woman who didn't want to be with him. But it did hurt me. It hurt me really bad. And I was too young to really communicate with him, so I just kind of pulled away. And during that time I went out with a guy—I hadn't slept with this person—and Prince found out. He said, "I wrote this song about you," and then he played "I Hate U." It was hard to hear. And it was even harder to hear the parts of the song that said it could have been a completely different way. Then to say, "I hate you because I love you"—I literally cried in front of him. I think he just wanted me to hear it and know that he was really upset. Then he flew me back to Los Angeles.
Glover: I had a boyfriend at the time. That was one thing [Prince] respected. They actually played basketball together. He was, "It's nice to meet you, man—I heard a lot about you." I told him, "That's the stupidest thing you could say! Everybody's heard a lot about Prince!"
Jill Jones: With him it was kind of like Groundhog Day. A repetition. He'd drive to his dad, he'd see his mom—those were the same introductory things and they never changed, no matter what woman came in. They all took the 6 A.M. drive. And the late-night things—I don't think I was the only one to say that Prince threw rocks or came and picked them up in the middle of the night. You'd go to a record store, you'd watch some movies, you'd make some popcorn. He was definitely a creature of habit.
Monday, December 26, 2016
True [X]: Nonlinear Advertising
It may not be possible to pinpoint the exact moment that media fragmentation reached its tipping point -- when more content was being produced than people had attention to spend with it -- but for some, the launch of the Fox television network 30 years ago was at least an important milestone.
Yes, cable TV’s multichannel universe had already begun splintering media consumption across an array of new channel options, but Fox fragmented consumer attention in an even bigger and more symbolic way, expanding the network television universe from the “Big 3” to the “Big 4.”
The explosion of channel options that would follow -- both linear and nonlinear -- over the next three decades arguably has been the No. 1 factor changing the way brands reach, engage and influence consumers in what some now believe is an “attention economy” that can no longer be valued on the basis of media exposure, but only on actual “engagement.” So it is probably fitting that Fox is the same company that is now leading an effort to shift the industry’s dependence from impressions-based ad exposures to attention-based engagements.
It is why Fox agreed to acquire digital engagement startup true[X] two years ago, and why it has put that team in charge of so-called “nonlinear advertising” revenues.
“The connections between brands and consumers have continued to evolve within digital video environments,” CEO James Murdoch stated when he announced the acquisition. In the two years since, Fox has begun integrating true[X]’s methods -- and importantly, its team -- in an effort to zero-base the economics of the commercial time it sells to its advertisers and presents to its viewers.
“The consumer has more choice than ever before, so the cost of getting their attention is going up,” explains David Levy, a co-founder of true[X], who was recently put in charge of all nonlinear advertising revenues for the Fox Networks Group.
In that role, Levy is developing new products, methods, metrics and advertising models that are all designed to achieve two corresponding goals: to increase the amount of advertising revenue per minute and to reduce the number of ads the average consumer is exposed to during Fox shows airing on nonlinear platforms.
While Levy’s portfolio includes inventory on digital and video-on-demand platforms, the work he is doing could ultimately portend new business models for linear viewing as the ad industry begins rethinking its historic impressions-based ad exposure metrics. Nearly half (47%) of advertisers and agency executives surveyed recently by Advertiser Perceptions for MediaPost said they believe time-spent exposure to ads will become a form of media-buying currency, while 27% believe it will become the ad industry’s standard for media buys.
While only 20% see the discussion surrounding time-spent measures of advertising as a “novelty,” few would argue that it has not become a major focus for Madison Avenue, as advertisers and agency execs are trying to come to terms with increasing choice and fragmentation and decreasing exposure to advertising.
Levy’s mission is to explore alternative solutions to simply increasing the number of ads -- especially ones that increase the yield for both advertisers and consumers, and as a result, for Fox’s programming.
Levy says Fox is developing a suite of new ad products that will be tested over the next year to learn which ones generate the best return for advertisers and views, but he acknowledges that shifting the ad industry to “pricing based on attention will be difficult.”
One of the problems, he says, is that it is difficult to scale pure attention-based models like true[X]’s “engagements” to the mass reach and frequency scale of television advertising.
The true[X] engagements are ad experiences that consumers explicitly opt into, usually because the brand is providing access to a premium content or gaming experience. Those engagements generally reap high CPMs, but they have relatively limited reach.
Fox has already begun to experiment with a variety of new formats and will introduce more over the next year, including ones that increase the yield of advertising by improving the relevance and effectiveness of ads via “advanced targeting” methods -- “where we will have better targeting so we can hit someone with a more accurate ad," Levy explains. "When we do that, we are likely to secure higher CPMs. We can then decide whether to reduce the number of commercials in that particular pod.”
by Joe Mandese, MediaPost | Read more:
Yes, cable TV’s multichannel universe had already begun splintering media consumption across an array of new channel options, but Fox fragmented consumer attention in an even bigger and more symbolic way, expanding the network television universe from the “Big 3” to the “Big 4.”
The explosion of channel options that would follow -- both linear and nonlinear -- over the next three decades arguably has been the No. 1 factor changing the way brands reach, engage and influence consumers in what some now believe is an “attention economy” that can no longer be valued on the basis of media exposure, but only on actual “engagement.” So it is probably fitting that Fox is the same company that is now leading an effort to shift the industry’s dependence from impressions-based ad exposures to attention-based engagements.It is why Fox agreed to acquire digital engagement startup true[X] two years ago, and why it has put that team in charge of so-called “nonlinear advertising” revenues.
“The connections between brands and consumers have continued to evolve within digital video environments,” CEO James Murdoch stated when he announced the acquisition. In the two years since, Fox has begun integrating true[X]’s methods -- and importantly, its team -- in an effort to zero-base the economics of the commercial time it sells to its advertisers and presents to its viewers.
“The consumer has more choice than ever before, so the cost of getting their attention is going up,” explains David Levy, a co-founder of true[X], who was recently put in charge of all nonlinear advertising revenues for the Fox Networks Group.
In that role, Levy is developing new products, methods, metrics and advertising models that are all designed to achieve two corresponding goals: to increase the amount of advertising revenue per minute and to reduce the number of ads the average consumer is exposed to during Fox shows airing on nonlinear platforms.
While Levy’s portfolio includes inventory on digital and video-on-demand platforms, the work he is doing could ultimately portend new business models for linear viewing as the ad industry begins rethinking its historic impressions-based ad exposure metrics. Nearly half (47%) of advertisers and agency executives surveyed recently by Advertiser Perceptions for MediaPost said they believe time-spent exposure to ads will become a form of media-buying currency, while 27% believe it will become the ad industry’s standard for media buys.
While only 20% see the discussion surrounding time-spent measures of advertising as a “novelty,” few would argue that it has not become a major focus for Madison Avenue, as advertisers and agency execs are trying to come to terms with increasing choice and fragmentation and decreasing exposure to advertising.
Levy’s mission is to explore alternative solutions to simply increasing the number of ads -- especially ones that increase the yield for both advertisers and consumers, and as a result, for Fox’s programming.
Levy says Fox is developing a suite of new ad products that will be tested over the next year to learn which ones generate the best return for advertisers and views, but he acknowledges that shifting the ad industry to “pricing based on attention will be difficult.”
One of the problems, he says, is that it is difficult to scale pure attention-based models like true[X]’s “engagements” to the mass reach and frequency scale of television advertising.
The true[X] engagements are ad experiences that consumers explicitly opt into, usually because the brand is providing access to a premium content or gaming experience. Those engagements generally reap high CPMs, but they have relatively limited reach.
Fox has already begun to experiment with a variety of new formats and will introduce more over the next year, including ones that increase the yield of advertising by improving the relevance and effectiveness of ads via “advanced targeting” methods -- “where we will have better targeting so we can hit someone with a more accurate ad," Levy explains. "When we do that, we are likely to secure higher CPMs. We can then decide whether to reduce the number of commercials in that particular pod.”
by Joe Mandese, MediaPost | Read more:
Image: MediaPost
The Widowhood Effect
I sit cross-legged on a white mat spread on the bathroom floor and examine the rows of medication lined up on the shelf of the vanity – neat piles of green-and-white boxes of blood thinners, a rainbow of pill bottles, painkillers worth thousands of dollars. I study the labels: Percocet, Zofran, Maxeran, dexamethasone. Take daily. Take twice daily. Take with food. Do not crush. Do not chew. Take as needed.
I wonder if a one-month supply of drugs intended to save a sick person’s life is enough to end a healthy one’s. It probably is if you consume them not as directed. Chew them, crush them, don’t take with food. Take handfuls at the same time. But the order matters. You must swallow an anti-nausea pill first so you don’t vomit up a $248 cancer pill. This, I know. I’ve watched someone take cancer medication when he was trying not to die.
I remember the day we brought these drugs home. On the afternoon of June 1, 2013, my 36-year-old husband, Spencer McLean, was discharged from Calgary’s Tom Baker Cancer Centre. As he changed from his hospital gown to his jeans, he let out a sob; he’d grown so thin that his jeans kept sliding down even with his belt cinched as tight as it could go.
On our way out of the cancer centre, we stopped at the hospital pharmacy to fill his prescriptions. We picked up a one-month’s supply that cost twice our monthly mortgage payment, despite our private insurance and government coverage of his $7,000-a-month cancer therapy. We sat as we waited nearly an hour for the medications to be prepared; Spencer was too tired to stand. When the pharmacist called us to the front, he handed us three white plastic bags filled with boxes and bottles.
We stepped into the foyer of our condo nervously. Our parents had come by to clean up the packaging and plastic needle covers the paramedics had tossed to the floor of our living room in a rush one week earlier before they whisked Spencer to emergency. Neither of us was comfortable being home. We knew a fair amount about medicine and cancer – he, a surgeon; me, a medical journalist. We knew Spencer’s cancer was extraordinarily aggressive. In the three weeks after his diagnosis, cancer galloped through his body at a ruthless pace, laying claim to his kidneys, his lungs, his liver. In its wake, clots formed in his blood, threatening to block arteries and veins. One had already clogged the vessel carrying blood to his liver, causing the organ to swell so large it extended across his abdomen and hogged any space that rightfully belonged to food. Each day became a balancing act in blood consistency: too thin, his kidney bled profusely; too thick, clots threatened to meander into his lungs and kill him.
At home that evening, right on schedule at 7 o’clock, Spencer took his cancer medication, then vomited it up. By morning, he was peeing out blood clots and couldn’t eat or drink. We reached our oncologist on his cellphone and he agreed we needed to return to hospital. We’d been home less than 24 hours.
Spencer and I lay down on our queen-size bed, on top of the white-and-beige duvet we’d received as a wedding present. On the other side of our open window, a bird tapped its beak on a metal vent. Spencer lay on his left side; his right ached too much to place pressure on it. I nuzzled in behind him and put my nose to his back, where I imagined his diseased kidney to be. We wept like that for half an hour. I inhaled deeply and pretended that I was drawing cancer out of his body and into mine. Then, Spencer said, “Let’s go.”
That was the last time we were home together. Three and a half weeks later, Spencer died of complications from renal-cell carcinoma – an agonizing 42 days after the day we sat holding hands and stunned on a hospital bed, as a nephrologist told us the diagnosis.
The widowhood effect
Now, our home is my home. Spencer left everything to me; he’d no time to be more deliberate in his will. He gave me his beloved bikes and skis, his damn pager that woke us up in the middle of the night, his collection of model leg bones and pelvises, and a bathroom full of drugs that were supposed to save his life.
The pile of medication in our bathroom – my bathroom, now – is a remnant of a life that no longer exists. I don’t know whether to dispose of these drugs or keep them in case I need them to end my own life. At 36, I am a widow.
The widowed are two and a half times more likely to die by suicide in the first year of widowhood than the general population. We are, in fact, more likely to die of many causes: heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, many seemingly random afflictions that are not so random after all. There’s a name for this in the scientific literature: the widowhood effect.
It’s dated now but a 1986 paper in the British Medical Journal explored death after bereavement. It opens atypically for a scientific paper: “The broken heart is well established in poetry and prose, but is there any scientific basis for such romantic imagery?” Indeed, there is, according to the author. He found that a strong association exists between spousal bereavement and death.
Multiple studies in the last 40 years have confirmed these findings. A meta-analysis published in 2012 that looked at all published studies of the widowhood effect found widowhood is associated with 22-per-cent higher risk of death compared to the married population. The effect is most pronounced among younger widows and widowers, defined as those in their 40s and 50s. The widowed in their 30s, like me, also die at higher rates than our married counterparts but the difference is not statistically significant – not because it is insignificant but because there are too few in this age group to detect measurable differences.
We are too few and too young to be significant.
by Christina Frangou, Globe and Mail | Read more:
Image: Drew Shannon
I wonder if a one-month supply of drugs intended to save a sick person’s life is enough to end a healthy one’s. It probably is if you consume them not as directed. Chew them, crush them, don’t take with food. Take handfuls at the same time. But the order matters. You must swallow an anti-nausea pill first so you don’t vomit up a $248 cancer pill. This, I know. I’ve watched someone take cancer medication when he was trying not to die.
I remember the day we brought these drugs home. On the afternoon of June 1, 2013, my 36-year-old husband, Spencer McLean, was discharged from Calgary’s Tom Baker Cancer Centre. As he changed from his hospital gown to his jeans, he let out a sob; he’d grown so thin that his jeans kept sliding down even with his belt cinched as tight as it could go.On our way out of the cancer centre, we stopped at the hospital pharmacy to fill his prescriptions. We picked up a one-month’s supply that cost twice our monthly mortgage payment, despite our private insurance and government coverage of his $7,000-a-month cancer therapy. We sat as we waited nearly an hour for the medications to be prepared; Spencer was too tired to stand. When the pharmacist called us to the front, he handed us three white plastic bags filled with boxes and bottles.
We stepped into the foyer of our condo nervously. Our parents had come by to clean up the packaging and plastic needle covers the paramedics had tossed to the floor of our living room in a rush one week earlier before they whisked Spencer to emergency. Neither of us was comfortable being home. We knew a fair amount about medicine and cancer – he, a surgeon; me, a medical journalist. We knew Spencer’s cancer was extraordinarily aggressive. In the three weeks after his diagnosis, cancer galloped through his body at a ruthless pace, laying claim to his kidneys, his lungs, his liver. In its wake, clots formed in his blood, threatening to block arteries and veins. One had already clogged the vessel carrying blood to his liver, causing the organ to swell so large it extended across his abdomen and hogged any space that rightfully belonged to food. Each day became a balancing act in blood consistency: too thin, his kidney bled profusely; too thick, clots threatened to meander into his lungs and kill him.
At home that evening, right on schedule at 7 o’clock, Spencer took his cancer medication, then vomited it up. By morning, he was peeing out blood clots and couldn’t eat or drink. We reached our oncologist on his cellphone and he agreed we needed to return to hospital. We’d been home less than 24 hours.
Spencer and I lay down on our queen-size bed, on top of the white-and-beige duvet we’d received as a wedding present. On the other side of our open window, a bird tapped its beak on a metal vent. Spencer lay on his left side; his right ached too much to place pressure on it. I nuzzled in behind him and put my nose to his back, where I imagined his diseased kidney to be. We wept like that for half an hour. I inhaled deeply and pretended that I was drawing cancer out of his body and into mine. Then, Spencer said, “Let’s go.”
That was the last time we were home together. Three and a half weeks later, Spencer died of complications from renal-cell carcinoma – an agonizing 42 days after the day we sat holding hands and stunned on a hospital bed, as a nephrologist told us the diagnosis.
The widowhood effect
Now, our home is my home. Spencer left everything to me; he’d no time to be more deliberate in his will. He gave me his beloved bikes and skis, his damn pager that woke us up in the middle of the night, his collection of model leg bones and pelvises, and a bathroom full of drugs that were supposed to save his life.
The pile of medication in our bathroom – my bathroom, now – is a remnant of a life that no longer exists. I don’t know whether to dispose of these drugs or keep them in case I need them to end my own life. At 36, I am a widow.
The widowed are two and a half times more likely to die by suicide in the first year of widowhood than the general population. We are, in fact, more likely to die of many causes: heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, many seemingly random afflictions that are not so random after all. There’s a name for this in the scientific literature: the widowhood effect.
It’s dated now but a 1986 paper in the British Medical Journal explored death after bereavement. It opens atypically for a scientific paper: “The broken heart is well established in poetry and prose, but is there any scientific basis for such romantic imagery?” Indeed, there is, according to the author. He found that a strong association exists between spousal bereavement and death.
Multiple studies in the last 40 years have confirmed these findings. A meta-analysis published in 2012 that looked at all published studies of the widowhood effect found widowhood is associated with 22-per-cent higher risk of death compared to the married population. The effect is most pronounced among younger widows and widowers, defined as those in their 40s and 50s. The widowed in their 30s, like me, also die at higher rates than our married counterparts but the difference is not statistically significant – not because it is insignificant but because there are too few in this age group to detect measurable differences.
We are too few and too young to be significant.
by Christina Frangou, Globe and Mail | Read more:
Image: Drew Shannon
More Online Shopping Means More Delivery Trucks
[ed. Glad someone is thinking about this.]
Two converging trends – the rise of e-commerce and urban population growth – are creating big challenges for cities. Online shoppers are learning to expect the urban freight delivery system to bring them whatever they want, wherever they want it, within one to two hours. That’s especially true during the holidays, as shipping companies hustle to deliver gift orders on time.
City managers and policymakers were already grappling with high demand and competing uses for scarce road, curb and sidewalk space. If cities do not act quickly to revamp the way they manage increasing numbers of commercial vehicles unloading goods in streets and alleys and into buildings, they will drown in a sea of double-parked trucks.
The Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics (SCTL) Center at the University of Washington has formed a new Urban Freight Lab to solve delivery system problems that cities and the business sector cannot handle on their own. Funders of this long-term strategic research partnership include the City of Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and five founding corporate members: Costco, FedEx, Nordstrom, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service.
The core problem facing cities is that they are trying to manage their part of a sophisticated data-powered 21st-century delivery system with tools designed for the 1800s – and they are often trying to do it alone. Consumers can order groceries, clothes and electronics with a click, but most cities only have a stripe of colored paint to manage truck parking at the curb. The Urban Freight Lab brings building managers, retailers, logistics and tech firms, and city government together to do applied research and develop advanced solutions.
We have reached the point where millions of people who live and work in cities purchase more than half of their goods online. This trend putting tremendous pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking and alley operations for trucks and other delivery vehicles. It also forces building operators to plan for the influx of online goods. A few years ago, building concierges may have received a few flower bouquets. Now many are sorting and storing groceries and other goods for hundreds of residents every week. (...)
SDOT recently published Seattle’s first draft Freight Master Plan, which includes high-level strategies to improve the urban goods delivery system. But before city managers act, they need evidence to prove which concepts will deliver results.
by Anne Goodchild and Barbara Ivanov, UW/The Conversation | Read more:
Two converging trends – the rise of e-commerce and urban population growth – are creating big challenges for cities. Online shoppers are learning to expect the urban freight delivery system to bring them whatever they want, wherever they want it, within one to two hours. That’s especially true during the holidays, as shipping companies hustle to deliver gift orders on time.
City managers and policymakers were already grappling with high demand and competing uses for scarce road, curb and sidewalk space. If cities do not act quickly to revamp the way they manage increasing numbers of commercial vehicles unloading goods in streets and alleys and into buildings, they will drown in a sea of double-parked trucks.The Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics (SCTL) Center at the University of Washington has formed a new Urban Freight Lab to solve delivery system problems that cities and the business sector cannot handle on their own. Funders of this long-term strategic research partnership include the City of Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and five founding corporate members: Costco, FedEx, Nordstrom, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service.
The core problem facing cities is that they are trying to manage their part of a sophisticated data-powered 21st-century delivery system with tools designed for the 1800s – and they are often trying to do it alone. Consumers can order groceries, clothes and electronics with a click, but most cities only have a stripe of colored paint to manage truck parking at the curb. The Urban Freight Lab brings building managers, retailers, logistics and tech firms, and city government together to do applied research and develop advanced solutions.
We have reached the point where millions of people who live and work in cities purchase more than half of their goods online. This trend putting tremendous pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking and alley operations for trucks and other delivery vehicles. It also forces building operators to plan for the influx of online goods. A few years ago, building concierges may have received a few flower bouquets. Now many are sorting and storing groceries and other goods for hundreds of residents every week. (...)
SDOT recently published Seattle’s first draft Freight Master Plan, which includes high-level strategies to improve the urban goods delivery system. But before city managers act, they need evidence to prove which concepts will deliver results.
by Anne Goodchild and Barbara Ivanov, UW/The Conversation | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Students Have Built A Coconut-Harvesting Robot
It’s a classic conundrum: Everyone wants coconuts, but no one wants to pick them.
Fear not, though. Students at Amrita University in Kerala have developed a solution—a coconut-harvesting robot.
The students began exploring this idea when a coconut farmer approached them about it in 2013, the Times of India reports. Three years later, they have unveiled their machine, which has grasping arms, a chunky torso, and several circular-sawblade appendages. (You can see some pictures of it here.)
Coconut harvesting is a field ripe for disruption. It’s hard, dangerous work—you either have to climb the tree and hang on while plucking the coconuts, or stand beneath it and saw them off with a long, blade-ended stick. The young people who would normally do it have lately been “taking up more ‘dignified’ professions,” the Times of India says.
Even those people who have stuck with the job are less than efficient: your average human can pick only 80 coconuts in a day. Instead, many farmers are using captive macaque monkeys, who can harvest up to 1600, NPR reported last year.
by Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura | Read more:
Fear not, though. Students at Amrita University in Kerala have developed a solution—a coconut-harvesting robot.The students began exploring this idea when a coconut farmer approached them about it in 2013, the Times of India reports. Three years later, they have unveiled their machine, which has grasping arms, a chunky torso, and several circular-sawblade appendages. (You can see some pictures of it here.)
Coconut harvesting is a field ripe for disruption. It’s hard, dangerous work—you either have to climb the tree and hang on while plucking the coconuts, or stand beneath it and saw them off with a long, blade-ended stick. The young people who would normally do it have lately been “taking up more ‘dignified’ professions,” the Times of India says.
Even those people who have stuck with the job are less than efficient: your average human can pick only 80 coconuts in a day. Instead, many farmers are using captive macaque monkeys, who can harvest up to 1600, NPR reported last year.
by Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura | Read more:
Image:PEXELS/CC0
Los Angeles Drivers on the 405 Ask: Was $1.6 Billion Worth It?
It is the very symbol of traffic and congestion. Interstate 405, or the 405, as it is known by the 300,000 drivers who endure it morning and night, is the busiest highway in the nation, a 72-mile swerving stretch of pavement that crosses the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles.
So it was that many Angelenos applauded when officials embarked on one of the most ambitious construction projects in modern times here: a $1 billion initiative to widen the highway. And drivers and others put up with no shortage of disruption — detours and delays, highway shutdowns, neighborhood streets clogged with cars — in the hopes of relieving one of the most notorious bottlenecks anywhere.
Six years after the first bulldozer rolled in, the construction crews are gone. A new car pool lane has opened, along with a network of on- and offramps and three new earthquake-resistant bridges.
But the question remains: Was it worth it?
“In the long term, it will make no difference to the traffic pattern,” said Marcia Hobbs, who has lived her whole life in Bel Air. “I haven’t noticed substantial cutbacks in traffic. As a matter of fact, I would say it was the opposite.”
The cost of the Sepulveda Pass project was supposed to be $1 billion. It has now reached $1.6 billion, after transit officials approved $300 million in new expenses last week.
Peak afternoon traffic time has indeed decreased to five hours from seven hours’ duration (yes, you read that right) and overall traffic capacity has increased. But congestion is as bad — even worse — during the busiest rush hours of 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., according to a study by the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
So it was that many Angelenos applauded when officials embarked on one of the most ambitious construction projects in modern times here: a $1 billion initiative to widen the highway. And drivers and others put up with no shortage of disruption — detours and delays, highway shutdowns, neighborhood streets clogged with cars — in the hopes of relieving one of the most notorious bottlenecks anywhere.Six years after the first bulldozer rolled in, the construction crews are gone. A new car pool lane has opened, along with a network of on- and offramps and three new earthquake-resistant bridges.
But the question remains: Was it worth it?
“In the long term, it will make no difference to the traffic pattern,” said Marcia Hobbs, who has lived her whole life in Bel Air. “I haven’t noticed substantial cutbacks in traffic. As a matter of fact, I would say it was the opposite.”
The cost of the Sepulveda Pass project was supposed to be $1 billion. It has now reached $1.6 billion, after transit officials approved $300 million in new expenses last week.
Peak afternoon traffic time has indeed decreased to five hours from seven hours’ duration (yes, you read that right) and overall traffic capacity has increased. But congestion is as bad — even worse — during the busiest rush hours of 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., according to a study by the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
by Adam Nagourney, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andrew Cullen
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