Sperm tested as possible candidate for delivering cancer medications in female patients
Image: arXiv:1703.08510 [physics.med-ph]
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Frontiers of Science
Sperm tested as possible candidate for delivering cancer medications in female patients
Image: arXiv:1703.08510 [physics.med-ph]
This Drone Is on a Mission to Rid Your City of Dog Poop
In an unexpected use of rapidly improving sensors and robots, Dutch entrepreneur Gerben Lievers invented a unique tool to solve all these problems at once: a poop-scooping drone.
The drone has already gone through multiple iterations, each improvement aiming to further perfect the technology so that it leaves streets as poop-free as possible.
The team’s first model, a drone called Watchdog 1, used thermal imaging to locate uncollected dog droppings by their warm temperatures compared to the surrounding area. That data was appended with GPS coordinates and sent to a ground-based robot called Patroldog 1, which rolled off to collect its target.
After trying both a vacuum-type collection mechanism and arms that really did ‘scoop’ the poop, the team decided the vacuum worked better because it can pick up material of various consistencies (ick).
Speaking of which, thermal imaging only identifies waste that is, ahem, fresh. What about the stuff that’s been sitting there for hours or days? It’s equally unpleasant, and should also be banished from sidewalks.
To solve this problem, the team added recognition software to the drone, training it to recognize stale poop from above using images.
Image: Tinki.nl/YouTube
[ed. I think we have a winner for next year's Nobel prize.]
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Seattle Mariners Imposing Order Limit On Popular Toasted Grasshoppers
After surprisingly selling out of grasshoppers at a concession stand for the first three games of the season, the Seattle Mariners have called in an emergency order so that they last throughout this weekend. The team is also imposing a per-game order limit for the rest of the season.
Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale told ESPN that the team sold 901 orders of the insects over the first three home games. The grasshoppers are toasted in a chili lime salt and come in a four-ounce cup for $4.
"We've sold roughly 18,000 grasshoppers," Hale said. "That's more than the restaurant [that runs the stand], Poquitos, sells in a year."
Poquitos is one of the new concession stands at Safeco Field this season as a part of the Mariners' and concessionaire Centerplate's strategy to add more of a local flair.![]()
The Mariners sold 901 orders of grasshoppers toasted in a chili lime salt during the first three home games at Safeco Field. Centerplate
Hale said the grasshoppers, which are an appetizer sold at Poquitos, were added to the ballpark menu as a novelty, but the team didn't expect them to be that popular.
That all changed when the item, known in Mexico as chapulines, received national attention.
Starting with Friday night's game, the Mariners will limit sales to 312 orders per game in honor of the team's longtime great Edgar Martinez's career batting average (.312), Hale said.
Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale told ESPN that the team sold 901 orders of the insects over the first three home games. The grasshoppers are toasted in a chili lime salt and come in a four-ounce cup for $4.
"We've sold roughly 18,000 grasshoppers," Hale said. "That's more than the restaurant [that runs the stand], Poquitos, sells in a year."Poquitos is one of the new concession stands at Safeco Field this season as a part of the Mariners' and concessionaire Centerplate's strategy to add more of a local flair.
Hale said the grasshoppers, which are an appetizer sold at Poquitos, were added to the ballpark menu as a novelty, but the team didn't expect them to be that popular.
That all changed when the item, known in Mexico as chapulines, received national attention.
Starting with Friday night's game, the Mariners will limit sales to 312 orders per game in honor of the team's longtime great Edgar Martinez's career batting average (.312), Hale said.
by Darren Rovell, ESPN | Read more:
Image: Centerplate
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
[ed. David Rawlings' guitar...]
Becky Johnson bought the farm
Becky Johnson bought the farm
Put a needle in her arm
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
And her brother laid her down
In the cold Kentucky ground
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
That's the way that it goes
Everybody's buying little baby clothes
That's the way that it ends
Though there was a time when she and I were friends
Well, Miranda ran away
Took her cat and left LA
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
She was busted, broke and flat
Had to sell that pussy cat
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
That's the way that it goes
Everybody's buying little baby clothes
That's the way that it ends
Though there was a time when he and I were friends
See the brightest ones of all
Early in October fall
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
While the dark ones go to bed
With good whiskey in their head
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
Now Billy Joe's back in the tank
You tell Russo, I'll tell Frank
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
Did he throw her down a well?
Did she leave him for that swell?
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
That's the way that it goes
Everybody's buying little baby clothes
That's the way that it ends
Though there was a time when all of us were friends
When you lay me down to rest
Leave a pistol in my vest
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
Do you miss my gentle touch?
Did I hurt you very much?
That's the way that it goes
That's the way
That's the way that it goes
Everybody's buying little baby clothes
That's the way that it ends
Though there was a time when you and I were friends
Apple Now Sells a 'Selfie' Drone Camera
A new, compact camera drone by Zero Zero Robotics is now available for purchase exclusively through Apple. The Hover Camera Passport is the perfect way to document your activities without having to be glued to your phone because it flies in the air, follows you on-the-go, and always keeps you in the shot.
Not only does it capture 13 MP photos, it also records 4K video. The footage can then be downloaded directly to your phone through a dedicated app. As for how to use the selfie drone, it’s as simple as unfolding the two “wings,” tapping the power button, and releasing it into the air. And how does it track your every move? Through sophisticated artificial intelligence facial recognition algorithms, natch.
by Lauren Ro, Recode | Read more:
Image: Designboom
Friday, April 14, 2017
Leaked Malware Threatens Windows Users Around the World
The ShadowBrokers, an entity previously confirmed by The Intercept to have leaked authentic malware used by the NSA to attack computers around the world, today released another cache of what appears to be extremely potent (and previously unknown) software capable of breaking into systems running Windows. The software could give nearly anyone with sufficient technical knowledge the ability to wreak havoc on millions of Microsoft users. (...)
According to security researcher and hacker Matthew Hickey, co-founder of Hacker House, the significance of what’s now publicly available, including “zero day” attacks on previously undisclosed vulnerabilities, cannot be overstated: “I don’t think I have ever seen so much exploits and 0day [exploits] released at one time in my entire life,” he told The Intercept via Twitter DM, “and I have been involved in computer hacking and security for 20 years.” Affected computers will remain vulnerable until Microsoft releases patches for the zero-day vulnerabilities and, more crucially, until their owners then apply those patches.
“This is as big as it gets,” Hickey said. “Nation-state attack tools are now in the hands of anyone who cares to download them…it’s literally a cyberweapon for hacking into computers…people will be using these attacks for years to come.”
[Ed. See also: The Latest Dump of Alleged NSA Tools Is ‘The Worst Thing Since Snowden'.
Update: Microsoft says it already patched 'Shadow Brokers' NSA leaks.]
According to security researcher and hacker Matthew Hickey, co-founder of Hacker House, the significance of what’s now publicly available, including “zero day” attacks on previously undisclosed vulnerabilities, cannot be overstated: “I don’t think I have ever seen so much exploits and 0day [exploits] released at one time in my entire life,” he told The Intercept via Twitter DM, “and I have been involved in computer hacking and security for 20 years.” Affected computers will remain vulnerable until Microsoft releases patches for the zero-day vulnerabilities and, more crucially, until their owners then apply those patches.“This is as big as it gets,” Hickey said. “Nation-state attack tools are now in the hands of anyone who cares to download them…it’s literally a cyberweapon for hacking into computers…people will be using these attacks for years to come.”
by Sam Biddle, Intercept | Read more:
Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images[Ed. See also: The Latest Dump of Alleged NSA Tools Is ‘The Worst Thing Since Snowden'.
Update: Microsoft says it already patched 'Shadow Brokers' NSA leaks.]
The (Un)Friendly Skies
Deconstructing the bullshit (its not what you think): United Passenger “Removal”: A Reporting and Management Fail
Image: Jimmy Kimmel /Youtube via:
[ed. Various reports indicate a cost of somewhere between $16 million - $314 million each for one of these babies. Even DOD doesn't appear to know the exact price. Nevertheless, taking the low figure, $16 million divided by 36 ISIS fighters = roughly $450,000 per casualty, not to mention whatever bonus you get for taking out innocent bystanders. I think 'gratuitous' is the word I'm looking for. The scariest thing is that Trump seems to be warming to the use of military spectacle as a means of juicing his popularity (with a complicit media egging him on). Pretty soon he'll be too far down the rabbit hole to turn back, and who knows what the consequences will be when he really pisses off a nation that can inflict return damages?]
Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not Here?
Ah, the blithe joys of springtime in the United States. Azaleas in bloom at the Masters, breezy picnics on balmy afternoons, Easter egg hunts — and the annual ordeal of tax forms, with helpful I.R.S. instructions like this: “Go to Part IV of Schedule I to figure line 52 if the estate or trust has qualified dividends or has a gain on lines 18a and 19 of column (2) of Schedule D (Form 1041) (as refigured for the AMT, if necessary).”
Americans will spend more than six billion hours this year gathering records and filling out forms, just to pay their taxes. They will pay some $10 billion to tax preparation firms to help get the job done and spend $2 billion on tax-preparation software (programs that still require hours of work). Millions will subsequently get a notice from the I.R.S. saying they got the figures wrong, or put the right number on the wrong line or added wrong in calculating line 47 — which means more hours of work or more fees to the tax preparer.
And here’s the most maddening thing of all: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Parliaments and revenue agencies all over the world have done what Congress seems totally unable to do: They’ve made paying taxes easy. If you walk down the street in Tel Aviv, Tokyo, London or Lima, Peru, you won’t see an office of H & R Block or a similar company; in most countries, there’s no need for that industry.
In the Netherlands, the Algemene Fiscale Politiek (the Dutch I.R.S.) has a slogan: “We can’t make paying taxes pleasant, but at least we can make it simple.” It is certainly simple for my friend Michael, a Dutch executive with a six-figure income, a range of investments and all the economic complications that come with an upper-bracket lifestyle.
An American in the same situation would have to fill out a dozen forms, six pages long. Michael, by contrast, sets aside 15 minutes per year to file his federal and local income tax, and that’s usually enough. But sometimes, he told me, he decides to check the figures the government has already filled in on his return. At this point, Michael was getting downright indignant. “I mean, some years, it takes me half an hour just to file my taxes!”
In Japan, you get a postcard in early spring from Kokuzeicho (Japan’s I.R.S.) that says how much you earned last year, how much tax you owed and how much was withheld. If you disagree, you go into the tax office to work it out. For nearly everybody, though, the numbers are correct, so you never have to file a return.
When I told my friend Togo Shigehiko in Tokyo that Americans spend hours or days each spring gathering records and filling out tax forms, he was incredulous. “Why would anybody want to do that?” he asked.
What’s going on in these countries — and in many other developed democracies — is that government computers handle the tedious chore of filling out your tax return. The system is called “pre-filled forms,” or “pre-populated returns.” The taxpayer just has to check the numbers. If the agency got something wrong, there’s a mechanism for appeal.
Our own Internal Revenue Service could do the same for tens of millions of taxpayers. For most families, the I.R.S. already knows all the numbers — wages, dividends and interest received, capital gains, mortgage interest paid, taxes withheld — that we are required to enter on Form 1040.
The I.R.S. sends out a letter called a CP2000 Notice by the millions every year. This is the form that says: You entered $4,311 on Line 9b, but the reports we have on file say the figure should have been $4,756. I get these letters now and then — the revenue service is always right — and it makes me mad. If the government already has all this stuff, why did I have to spend hours digging through receipts and statements and 1099 forms to report what the I.R.S. already knows?
Questions like that have prompted some members of Congress — including Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon; Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts; and Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana — to champion pre-filled forms. But their bills never went anywhere because the tax-preparation industry lobbies strenuously against them. The “Tax Complexity Lobby,” as it has been called, includes big national preparers like H & R Block and tax-prep software companies.
Americans will spend more than six billion hours this year gathering records and filling out forms, just to pay their taxes. They will pay some $10 billion to tax preparation firms to help get the job done and spend $2 billion on tax-preparation software (programs that still require hours of work). Millions will subsequently get a notice from the I.R.S. saying they got the figures wrong, or put the right number on the wrong line or added wrong in calculating line 47 — which means more hours of work or more fees to the tax preparer.
And here’s the most maddening thing of all: It doesn’t have to be this way.Parliaments and revenue agencies all over the world have done what Congress seems totally unable to do: They’ve made paying taxes easy. If you walk down the street in Tel Aviv, Tokyo, London or Lima, Peru, you won’t see an office of H & R Block or a similar company; in most countries, there’s no need for that industry.
In the Netherlands, the Algemene Fiscale Politiek (the Dutch I.R.S.) has a slogan: “We can’t make paying taxes pleasant, but at least we can make it simple.” It is certainly simple for my friend Michael, a Dutch executive with a six-figure income, a range of investments and all the economic complications that come with an upper-bracket lifestyle.
An American in the same situation would have to fill out a dozen forms, six pages long. Michael, by contrast, sets aside 15 minutes per year to file his federal and local income tax, and that’s usually enough. But sometimes, he told me, he decides to check the figures the government has already filled in on his return. At this point, Michael was getting downright indignant. “I mean, some years, it takes me half an hour just to file my taxes!”
In Japan, you get a postcard in early spring from Kokuzeicho (Japan’s I.R.S.) that says how much you earned last year, how much tax you owed and how much was withheld. If you disagree, you go into the tax office to work it out. For nearly everybody, though, the numbers are correct, so you never have to file a return.
When I told my friend Togo Shigehiko in Tokyo that Americans spend hours or days each spring gathering records and filling out tax forms, he was incredulous. “Why would anybody want to do that?” he asked.
What’s going on in these countries — and in many other developed democracies — is that government computers handle the tedious chore of filling out your tax return. The system is called “pre-filled forms,” or “pre-populated returns.” The taxpayer just has to check the numbers. If the agency got something wrong, there’s a mechanism for appeal.
Our own Internal Revenue Service could do the same for tens of millions of taxpayers. For most families, the I.R.S. already knows all the numbers — wages, dividends and interest received, capital gains, mortgage interest paid, taxes withheld — that we are required to enter on Form 1040.
The I.R.S. sends out a letter called a CP2000 Notice by the millions every year. This is the form that says: You entered $4,311 on Line 9b, but the reports we have on file say the figure should have been $4,756. I get these letters now and then — the revenue service is always right — and it makes me mad. If the government already has all this stuff, why did I have to spend hours digging through receipts and statements and 1099 forms to report what the I.R.S. already knows?
Questions like that have prompted some members of Congress — including Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon; Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts; and Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana — to champion pre-filled forms. But their bills never went anywhere because the tax-preparation industry lobbies strenuously against them. The “Tax Complexity Lobby,” as it has been called, includes big national preparers like H & R Block and tax-prep software companies.
by T.R. Reid, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Selman Design
Machine Envy
Whenever I visit scientists to discuss their research, there comes a moment when they say, with barely concealed pride: ‘Do you want a tour of the lab?’ It is invariably slightly touching — like Willy Wonka dying to show off his chocolate factory. I’m glad to accept, knowing what lies in store: shelves lined with bottles or reagents; gleaming, quartz-windowed cryogenic chambers; slabs of perforated steel holding lasers and lenses.
It’s rarely less than impressive. Even if the kit is off-the-shelf, it is wired into a makeshift salmagundi of wires, tubes, cladding, computer-controlled valves and rotors and components with more mysterious functions. Much of the gear, however, is likely to be homemade: custom-built for the research at hand. Whatever else it might accomplish, the typical modern lab set-up is a masterpiece of impromptu engineering — you’d need degrees in electronics and mechanics just to put it all together, never mind making sense of the graphs and numbers it produces. And like the best engineering, these set-ups tend to be kept out of sight. Headlines announcing ‘Scientists have found…’ rarely bother to tell you how the discoveries were made.
Would you care? The tools of science are so specialised that we accept them as a kind of occult machinery for producing knowledge. We figure that they must know how it all works. Likewise, histories of science focus on ideas rather than methods — for the most part, readers just want to know what the discoveries were. Even so, most historians these days recognise that the relationship between scientists and their instruments is an essential part of the story. It isn’t simply that the science is dependent on the devices; the devices actually determine what is known. You explore the things that you have the means to explore, planning your questions accordingly.
When a new instrument comes along, new vistas open up. The telescope and microscope, for example, stimulated discovery by superpowering human perception. Such developments prompt scientists to look at their own machines with fresh eyes. It’s not fanciful to see some of the same anxieties that are found in human relations. Can you be trusted? What are you trying to tell me? You’ve changed my life! Look, isn’t she beautiful? I’m bored with you, you don’t tell me anything new any more. Sorry, I’m swapping you for a newer model… We might even speak of interactions between scientists and their instruments that are healthy or dysfunctional. But how do we tell one from the other?
It seems to me that the most effective (not to mention elegant) scientific instruments serve not only as superpowers for the senses but as prostheses for the mind. They are the physical embodiments of particular thoughts. Take the work of the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, perhaps the finest experimental scientist of the 20th century. It was at a humble benchtop with cheap, improvised equipment that he discovered the structure of the atom, then proceeded to split it. Rather than being limited by someone else’s view of what one needed to know, Rutherford devised an apparatus to tell him precisely what he wanted to find out. His experiments emerged organically from his ideas: they almost seem like theories constructed out of glass and metal foil.
In one of his finest moments, at Manchester University in 1908, Rutherford and his colleagues figured out that the alpha particles spewed out during radioactive decay were the nuclei of helium atoms. The natural way to test the hypothesis is to collect the particles and see if they behave like helium. Rutherford ordered his glassblower, Otto Baumbach, to make a glass capillary tube with extraordinarily thin walls such that the alpha particles emitted from radium could pass right through. Once the particles had accumulated in an outer chamber, Rutherford connected up the apparatus to become a gas-discharge tube. As electrodes converted the atoms in the gas into charged ions, they would emit light at a wavelength that depended on their chemical identity. Thus he revealed the trapped alpha particles to be helium, disclosed by the signature wavelength of their glow. It was an exceedingly rare example of a piece of apparatus that answers a well-defined question — are alpha particles helium? — with a simple yes/no answer, almost literally by whether a light switches on or not. (...)
Today, however, they have become symbols of prestige as never before. I have several times been invited to admire the most state-of-the-art device in a laboratory purely for its own sake, as though I was being shown a Lamborghini. Stuart Blume, a historian of medical technology of the University of Amsterdam, has argued that the latest equipment serves as a token of institutional might, a piece of window-dressing to enhance one’s competitive position in the quasi-marketplace of scientific ideas. I recently interviewed several chemists about their use of second-hand equipment, often acquired from the scientific equivalents of eBay. Strangely, they all asked to remain anonymous, as though their thrift would mark them out as second-rate scientists.
One of the dysfunctional consequences of this sort of attitude is that the machine becomes its own justification, its own measure of worth. Results seem ‘important’ not because of what they tell us but because of how they were obtained. Despite its initial myopia, the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most glorious instruments ever made, a genuinely new window on the universe. Even so, when it first began to send back images of the cosmos in the mid-1990s, Nature was plagued with content-free submissions reporting the first ‘Hubble image’ of this or that astrophysical object. Authors were often affronted to hear that the journal wanted, not the latest pretty picture, but some insight into the process it was depicting.
At least this kind of instrument-worship is relatively harmless in the long run. More problematic is the notion of an instrument as a ‘knowledge machine’, a contraption that will churn out new understanding as long as you keep cranking the handle.
It’s rarely less than impressive. Even if the kit is off-the-shelf, it is wired into a makeshift salmagundi of wires, tubes, cladding, computer-controlled valves and rotors and components with more mysterious functions. Much of the gear, however, is likely to be homemade: custom-built for the research at hand. Whatever else it might accomplish, the typical modern lab set-up is a masterpiece of impromptu engineering — you’d need degrees in electronics and mechanics just to put it all together, never mind making sense of the graphs and numbers it produces. And like the best engineering, these set-ups tend to be kept out of sight. Headlines announcing ‘Scientists have found…’ rarely bother to tell you how the discoveries were made.Would you care? The tools of science are so specialised that we accept them as a kind of occult machinery for producing knowledge. We figure that they must know how it all works. Likewise, histories of science focus on ideas rather than methods — for the most part, readers just want to know what the discoveries were. Even so, most historians these days recognise that the relationship between scientists and their instruments is an essential part of the story. It isn’t simply that the science is dependent on the devices; the devices actually determine what is known. You explore the things that you have the means to explore, planning your questions accordingly.
When a new instrument comes along, new vistas open up. The telescope and microscope, for example, stimulated discovery by superpowering human perception. Such developments prompt scientists to look at their own machines with fresh eyes. It’s not fanciful to see some of the same anxieties that are found in human relations. Can you be trusted? What are you trying to tell me? You’ve changed my life! Look, isn’t she beautiful? I’m bored with you, you don’t tell me anything new any more. Sorry, I’m swapping you for a newer model… We might even speak of interactions between scientists and their instruments that are healthy or dysfunctional. But how do we tell one from the other?
It seems to me that the most effective (not to mention elegant) scientific instruments serve not only as superpowers for the senses but as prostheses for the mind. They are the physical embodiments of particular thoughts. Take the work of the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, perhaps the finest experimental scientist of the 20th century. It was at a humble benchtop with cheap, improvised equipment that he discovered the structure of the atom, then proceeded to split it. Rather than being limited by someone else’s view of what one needed to know, Rutherford devised an apparatus to tell him precisely what he wanted to find out. His experiments emerged organically from his ideas: they almost seem like theories constructed out of glass and metal foil.
In one of his finest moments, at Manchester University in 1908, Rutherford and his colleagues figured out that the alpha particles spewed out during radioactive decay were the nuclei of helium atoms. The natural way to test the hypothesis is to collect the particles and see if they behave like helium. Rutherford ordered his glassblower, Otto Baumbach, to make a glass capillary tube with extraordinarily thin walls such that the alpha particles emitted from radium could pass right through. Once the particles had accumulated in an outer chamber, Rutherford connected up the apparatus to become a gas-discharge tube. As electrodes converted the atoms in the gas into charged ions, they would emit light at a wavelength that depended on their chemical identity. Thus he revealed the trapped alpha particles to be helium, disclosed by the signature wavelength of their glow. It was an exceedingly rare example of a piece of apparatus that answers a well-defined question — are alpha particles helium? — with a simple yes/no answer, almost literally by whether a light switches on or not. (...)
Today, however, they have become symbols of prestige as never before. I have several times been invited to admire the most state-of-the-art device in a laboratory purely for its own sake, as though I was being shown a Lamborghini. Stuart Blume, a historian of medical technology of the University of Amsterdam, has argued that the latest equipment serves as a token of institutional might, a piece of window-dressing to enhance one’s competitive position in the quasi-marketplace of scientific ideas. I recently interviewed several chemists about their use of second-hand equipment, often acquired from the scientific equivalents of eBay. Strangely, they all asked to remain anonymous, as though their thrift would mark them out as second-rate scientists.
One of the dysfunctional consequences of this sort of attitude is that the machine becomes its own justification, its own measure of worth. Results seem ‘important’ not because of what they tell us but because of how they were obtained. Despite its initial myopia, the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most glorious instruments ever made, a genuinely new window on the universe. Even so, when it first began to send back images of the cosmos in the mid-1990s, Nature was plagued with content-free submissions reporting the first ‘Hubble image’ of this or that astrophysical object. Authors were often affronted to hear that the journal wanted, not the latest pretty picture, but some insight into the process it was depicting.
At least this kind of instrument-worship is relatively harmless in the long run. More problematic is the notion of an instrument as a ‘knowledge machine’, a contraption that will churn out new understanding as long as you keep cranking the handle.
by Phillip Ball, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Gregg Segal/Gallery Stock
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Mercy Markets
That there is always hardship in the world, always a person in need of a leg up financially, is not peculiar to our time, but social media have worked to collapse these tragedies indiscriminately into our lives, eradicating the levels of distance that once seemed built in to them. We could once justify not giving to a homeless woman on the street because we had no cash on us, or to the charitable cause some earnest teenager called about by claiming we’re out on a run and don’t have our cards handy. But the internet’s bottomless well of needs appears directly into our timelines often enough that we can’t go on making excuses for why we don’t give. Even if those excuses are just to ourselves. (...)
Such projects allowed funders to feel like they were investing in human potential, taking direct responsibility for the technologies and cultural innovations that will propel us into the future. But giving to a medical crowdfund is less about creating the future than salvaging something from a status quo that is not actually in our best interest to perpetuate. “Producing a worthy illness: Personal crowdfunding amidst financial crisis,” a study by professors Lauren S. Berliner and Nora J. Kenworthy, looked at 200 randomly selected GoFundMe campaigns seeking funds for medical care and found that the “campaigners do not seem to feel that it is necessary to explain insurance status in order to demonstrate deservingness or credibility, indicating that Americans are well-acquainted with the inadequate financial protections offered by insurance, and the unavoidable, extraordinary medical expenses that characterize serious illness or disability within contexts of health care austerity in the U.S.”
The publicly available data from crowdfunding sites suggest people are eager to give: GoFundMe has raised over $3 billion dollars from its 25 million donors, with medical expenses being its top fundraising category. YouCaring has raised over $550 million across 290,000 fundraisers since its inception in 2011. The promotional copy on all these sites, coupled with the campaigns that earn a spot on the local or national news, make it seem as though crowdfunding works and works well. There is some truth to the idea of American altruism: Pew Research Center found in 2016 that while only 22 percent of adults had contributed to a crowdfunding platform, 68 percent of those were for individuals facing hardship. (The second most common contribution, funding a product or invention, was 34 percent.) And seeing as 61 percent of Americans didn’t know the word crowdfunding, it’s possible they’ve given to a crowdfund without knowing it.
Beneath those feel good numbers is a more stark reality: Berliner and Kenworthy’s research revealed that 90 percent of the campaigns did not meet their goal and that average level reached was about 40 percent. The sheer volume of needs on crowdfunding sites means that for any campaign to be successful, it has to become far more visible than the rest. “On top of managing your health and your expenses, now you have to make sure you present your malady with authenticity. Think of your cancer as the origin story a tech startup tells about itself on the About section of its website,” writes Luke O’Neill in a recent Esquire feature on how crowdfunders often rely on going viral. In this context, the sick cannot rely on, say, the inherent good of supporting cancer treatment in general but must market themselves as being especially worthy and more likable than other cancer patients. (...)
The crowdfunding platforms are aware of this need for virality, but rather than mitigate it, they offer false hopes for success in the form of exceedingly basic best practices for campaigns. YouCaring has a post, “Viral Fundraising: Make the Most of Your Campaign’s Potential,” that features detailed instructions on everything from what time of day to post your campaign on social media to the always helpful advice to use high-quality images instead of those ultra-shitty ones you had planned. On Generosity, IndieGogo’s charity vertical, a post on “impactful” personal messaging implores campaigners to “Share, share, share!” and notes “You aren’t limited to your network, or even your network’s network — with the right sharing strategy and a little bit of luck, you have the potential to share your fundraiser with millions of people worldwide.”
What these instructions don’t mention is that you’re probably out of luck from the start if you don’t have key social media literacies that lend themselves to people believing in your deservingness. They also don’t mention the research that demonstrates that fundraising while visibly Black has proved less successful than fundraising while white. They don’t mention that you’re more likely to attract contributions if users identify with you in some way that compels them to act on your behalf — meaning the more marginal your identity with respect to your audience, the less likely they are to give to you. They don’t tell you how a 2016 study in Information Systems Frontiers found that longer project descriptions yielded a higher likelihood of funding, as did having a moderately positive tone — though too much positivity was linked to lower funding outcomes, perhaps due to credibility issues. In short, the sites’ advice do not address the many biases of potential donors.
In Berliner and Kenworthy’s study, they compared a highly polished campaign for Van, a six-year old with rhabdomyosarcoma, with a father of four’s campaign for funds to pay for adenomatis polyposis treatment and for care and treatment for his two autistic sons. From that description alone, it is one tough game of “Would You Rather?” But the high media literacy of Van’s campaign managers put him miles ahead of the father of four, whose trouble articulating specific needs and even navigating the site have left his campaign largely neglected.
Moskowitz points out in his Wired article that championing ad hoc public fundraising for infrastructure and social services normalizes the idea that individual citizens should consider themselves responsible for such basic necessities. Given the political history of health care in the U.S., the onus on the individual feels ever more urgent.
The decision to click on the crowdfunding link comes most often from a decent place, but decency alone cannot help us determine the worthiness of a campaign. Most citizens are unequipped to determine whose financial and medical needs are most acute and are actually more likely to withhold contributions to those with the most complex and dire needs because their requests are not as coherent or specific as those with the social and real capital to put together flashy campaigns starring photogenic, chronically ill children.
by Alana Massey, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Aiden Morse
Such projects allowed funders to feel like they were investing in human potential, taking direct responsibility for the technologies and cultural innovations that will propel us into the future. But giving to a medical crowdfund is less about creating the future than salvaging something from a status quo that is not actually in our best interest to perpetuate. “Producing a worthy illness: Personal crowdfunding amidst financial crisis,” a study by professors Lauren S. Berliner and Nora J. Kenworthy, looked at 200 randomly selected GoFundMe campaigns seeking funds for medical care and found that the “campaigners do not seem to feel that it is necessary to explain insurance status in order to demonstrate deservingness or credibility, indicating that Americans are well-acquainted with the inadequate financial protections offered by insurance, and the unavoidable, extraordinary medical expenses that characterize serious illness or disability within contexts of health care austerity in the U.S.”
The publicly available data from crowdfunding sites suggest people are eager to give: GoFundMe has raised over $3 billion dollars from its 25 million donors, with medical expenses being its top fundraising category. YouCaring has raised over $550 million across 290,000 fundraisers since its inception in 2011. The promotional copy on all these sites, coupled with the campaigns that earn a spot on the local or national news, make it seem as though crowdfunding works and works well. There is some truth to the idea of American altruism: Pew Research Center found in 2016 that while only 22 percent of adults had contributed to a crowdfunding platform, 68 percent of those were for individuals facing hardship. (The second most common contribution, funding a product or invention, was 34 percent.) And seeing as 61 percent of Americans didn’t know the word crowdfunding, it’s possible they’ve given to a crowdfund without knowing it.Beneath those feel good numbers is a more stark reality: Berliner and Kenworthy’s research revealed that 90 percent of the campaigns did not meet their goal and that average level reached was about 40 percent. The sheer volume of needs on crowdfunding sites means that for any campaign to be successful, it has to become far more visible than the rest. “On top of managing your health and your expenses, now you have to make sure you present your malady with authenticity. Think of your cancer as the origin story a tech startup tells about itself on the About section of its website,” writes Luke O’Neill in a recent Esquire feature on how crowdfunders often rely on going viral. In this context, the sick cannot rely on, say, the inherent good of supporting cancer treatment in general but must market themselves as being especially worthy and more likable than other cancer patients. (...)
The crowdfunding platforms are aware of this need for virality, but rather than mitigate it, they offer false hopes for success in the form of exceedingly basic best practices for campaigns. YouCaring has a post, “Viral Fundraising: Make the Most of Your Campaign’s Potential,” that features detailed instructions on everything from what time of day to post your campaign on social media to the always helpful advice to use high-quality images instead of those ultra-shitty ones you had planned. On Generosity, IndieGogo’s charity vertical, a post on “impactful” personal messaging implores campaigners to “Share, share, share!” and notes “You aren’t limited to your network, or even your network’s network — with the right sharing strategy and a little bit of luck, you have the potential to share your fundraiser with millions of people worldwide.”
What these instructions don’t mention is that you’re probably out of luck from the start if you don’t have key social media literacies that lend themselves to people believing in your deservingness. They also don’t mention the research that demonstrates that fundraising while visibly Black has proved less successful than fundraising while white. They don’t mention that you’re more likely to attract contributions if users identify with you in some way that compels them to act on your behalf — meaning the more marginal your identity with respect to your audience, the less likely they are to give to you. They don’t tell you how a 2016 study in Information Systems Frontiers found that longer project descriptions yielded a higher likelihood of funding, as did having a moderately positive tone — though too much positivity was linked to lower funding outcomes, perhaps due to credibility issues. In short, the sites’ advice do not address the many biases of potential donors.
In Berliner and Kenworthy’s study, they compared a highly polished campaign for Van, a six-year old with rhabdomyosarcoma, with a father of four’s campaign for funds to pay for adenomatis polyposis treatment and for care and treatment for his two autistic sons. From that description alone, it is one tough game of “Would You Rather?” But the high media literacy of Van’s campaign managers put him miles ahead of the father of four, whose trouble articulating specific needs and even navigating the site have left his campaign largely neglected.
Moskowitz points out in his Wired article that championing ad hoc public fundraising for infrastructure and social services normalizes the idea that individual citizens should consider themselves responsible for such basic necessities. Given the political history of health care in the U.S., the onus on the individual feels ever more urgent.
The decision to click on the crowdfunding link comes most often from a decent place, but decency alone cannot help us determine the worthiness of a campaign. Most citizens are unequipped to determine whose financial and medical needs are most acute and are actually more likely to withhold contributions to those with the most complex and dire needs because their requests are not as coherent or specific as those with the social and real capital to put together flashy campaigns starring photogenic, chronically ill children.
by Alana Massey, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Aiden Morse
Monday, April 10, 2017
Was Bo Diddley a Buddha?
When I was in my 20s, I had the good fortune to play guitar as an opening act for the blues legend B. B. King. This lucky break opened many doors for me, and I soon found myself playing with other great blues musicians — Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy and Bo Diddley, to name a few. During one stretch time, Bo hired me whenever he played in Chicago.
Before my first gig with Bo, I spent a full week of intense preparation, learning and rehearsing his songs. On the opening night, he arrived to the venue five minutes before showtime. As he walked onstage in front of 500 shouting fans, I tried to tell him all the songs I’d prepared. He just looked at me blankly through his Coke-bottle glasses, plugged into his amp and launched into a loud, rhythmic riff on his trademark rectangular guitar. He never bothered to tell me what song we were playing, what chord changes were coming, what key we were in, or anything. But, as every blues and jazz musician knows, that’s how it goes.
After the first tune, he realized that I could follow him, and he cryptically shouted, “This monkey is tied, now let’s skin it!”
Bo and the other greats I played with often worked this way, and it was a hair-raising on-the-job education. These musicians never told me what was coming next, partly because they didn’t know themselves. They were masters of the art of improvisation.
In learning this art, I had to fumble to find the chord we were playing. That usually told me the key signature. Sometimes I could assume a certain chord progression and scale, but not always. Then I had to watch the bandleader like a hawk, for subtle cues — this tilt of the guitar means I solo, that slight bend of the knees means bring the dynamic down, this sudden jerk of the upper body means break. Or stop.
Improvising, in music, is the act of composing and performing simultaneously, and it is difficult to master. But it is also universal, and despite the powerful human impulse to plan and program, integral to nearly every aspect of our lives. No matter who you are — a welder, philosopher, a guitarist or a president — you are in some sense simultaneously making the map of your life and following it. It is not an exaggeration to say life itself is one long improvisation.
Consider seasoned travelers, for instance. They are typically imperfect communicators, but good improvisers. Talking with a stranger in a language not your own requires the interplay of prepared tools and real-time creativity. The process is filled with awkward gestures, incorrect pronunciations and occasional triumphs. We trust our bodies and muscle memory to succeed where intellectual calculation and semantic memory fail.
Improvising is a style of thinking generally. It investigates and helps us come to know the world not by theory but by a method of simulation — observing, listening, acting. I would argue, in fact, that it is the most fundamental form of human cognition, one that must have evolved long before deductive and inductive logic, when the first humans began developing the skills needed for their survival in an untamed environment.
In music, improvising with others requires a language of musical tools and norms. As the great jazz pianist Bill Evans put it, “Intuition has to lead knowledge, but it can’t be out there alone.” Some of the common tools (like scales and chords) and norms (conventions of dynamics, breaks or progressions) are learned on the job. They are acquired in the process of the communication itself. A more open and attentive listener acquires more innovative and nuanced moves, and increases the lexicon of expressive gestures.
In music, at least, improvisation sometimes gets a bad rap, usually from the precincts of classical or other formal Western styles that rely on notation. It is sometimes looked down upon with a “my kid could do that” kind of dismissive attitude. But the ability to improvise is not just “winging it.” It is built on foundations of study and practice that prepare the improviser for the moment of action.
“Wu-Wei” is a Chinese word that is often translated as “non-action” but more accurately means “natural action,” or action in accordance with nature. The idea, dominant in Taoism and Zen, is that one should try to find the natural way of doing something and then simulate, or align oneself to it, as opposed to forcing it. For example, the butcher should carve the animal at its joints, not in arbitrary locations. A carpenter should work with the grain of wood, rather than against it. A martial arts master should find the most economic use of his energy, and turn his opponent’s own force to his advantage, and so on. Finding this natural way is not effortless, but requires great practice. Once it has been mastered, however, it is possible to find a unique presence of mind in these activities. The mundane actions are turned into artistic and even spiritual expressions. Playing a musical instrument, boxing in a competition, and even folding your laundry can be Zen-like improvisations.
Zen Buddhism and Taoism focus more on the method of your life rather than the content of your life. It’s not so much who you are, or even what you do in life. Rather, it’s how you do it. Since, in these practices, the present moment is ultimate reality (albeit usually obscured and hidden in regular consciousness), all one needs to do is shut off the babble of discursive thought and sink into one’s present activity.
by Stephen T. Asma, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Bo Diddley performing with Chuck Berry in 1972. CreditMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Before my first gig with Bo, I spent a full week of intense preparation, learning and rehearsing his songs. On the opening night, he arrived to the venue five minutes before showtime. As he walked onstage in front of 500 shouting fans, I tried to tell him all the songs I’d prepared. He just looked at me blankly through his Coke-bottle glasses, plugged into his amp and launched into a loud, rhythmic riff on his trademark rectangular guitar. He never bothered to tell me what song we were playing, what chord changes were coming, what key we were in, or anything. But, as every blues and jazz musician knows, that’s how it goes.
After the first tune, he realized that I could follow him, and he cryptically shouted, “This monkey is tied, now let’s skin it!”
Bo and the other greats I played with often worked this way, and it was a hair-raising on-the-job education. These musicians never told me what was coming next, partly because they didn’t know themselves. They were masters of the art of improvisation.In learning this art, I had to fumble to find the chord we were playing. That usually told me the key signature. Sometimes I could assume a certain chord progression and scale, but not always. Then I had to watch the bandleader like a hawk, for subtle cues — this tilt of the guitar means I solo, that slight bend of the knees means bring the dynamic down, this sudden jerk of the upper body means break. Or stop.
Improvising, in music, is the act of composing and performing simultaneously, and it is difficult to master. But it is also universal, and despite the powerful human impulse to plan and program, integral to nearly every aspect of our lives. No matter who you are — a welder, philosopher, a guitarist or a president — you are in some sense simultaneously making the map of your life and following it. It is not an exaggeration to say life itself is one long improvisation.
Consider seasoned travelers, for instance. They are typically imperfect communicators, but good improvisers. Talking with a stranger in a language not your own requires the interplay of prepared tools and real-time creativity. The process is filled with awkward gestures, incorrect pronunciations and occasional triumphs. We trust our bodies and muscle memory to succeed where intellectual calculation and semantic memory fail.
Improvising is a style of thinking generally. It investigates and helps us come to know the world not by theory but by a method of simulation — observing, listening, acting. I would argue, in fact, that it is the most fundamental form of human cognition, one that must have evolved long before deductive and inductive logic, when the first humans began developing the skills needed for their survival in an untamed environment.
In music, improvising with others requires a language of musical tools and norms. As the great jazz pianist Bill Evans put it, “Intuition has to lead knowledge, but it can’t be out there alone.” Some of the common tools (like scales and chords) and norms (conventions of dynamics, breaks or progressions) are learned on the job. They are acquired in the process of the communication itself. A more open and attentive listener acquires more innovative and nuanced moves, and increases the lexicon of expressive gestures.
In music, at least, improvisation sometimes gets a bad rap, usually from the precincts of classical or other formal Western styles that rely on notation. It is sometimes looked down upon with a “my kid could do that” kind of dismissive attitude. But the ability to improvise is not just “winging it.” It is built on foundations of study and practice that prepare the improviser for the moment of action.
“Wu-Wei” is a Chinese word that is often translated as “non-action” but more accurately means “natural action,” or action in accordance with nature. The idea, dominant in Taoism and Zen, is that one should try to find the natural way of doing something and then simulate, or align oneself to it, as opposed to forcing it. For example, the butcher should carve the animal at its joints, not in arbitrary locations. A carpenter should work with the grain of wood, rather than against it. A martial arts master should find the most economic use of his energy, and turn his opponent’s own force to his advantage, and so on. Finding this natural way is not effortless, but requires great practice. Once it has been mastered, however, it is possible to find a unique presence of mind in these activities. The mundane actions are turned into artistic and even spiritual expressions. Playing a musical instrument, boxing in a competition, and even folding your laundry can be Zen-like improvisations.
Zen Buddhism and Taoism focus more on the method of your life rather than the content of your life. It’s not so much who you are, or even what you do in life. Rather, it’s how you do it. Since, in these practices, the present moment is ultimate reality (albeit usually obscured and hidden in regular consciousness), all one needs to do is shut off the babble of discursive thought and sink into one’s present activity.
by Stephen T. Asma, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Bo Diddley performing with Chuck Berry in 1972. CreditMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Walking While Black
“My only sin is my skin. What did I do, to be so black and blue?”
–Fats Waller, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”
“Manhattan’s streets I saunter’d, pondering.”
–Walt Whitman, “Manhattan’s Streets I Saunter’d, Pondering”
My love for walking started in childhood, out of necessity. No thanks to a stepfather with heavy hands, I found every reason to stay away from home and was usually out—at some friend’s house or at a street party where no minor should be—until it was too late to get public transportation. So I walked.
The streets of Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1980s were often terrifying—you could, for instance, get killed if a political henchman thought you came from the wrong neighborhood, or even if you wore the wrong color. Wearing orange showed affiliation with one political party and green with the other, and if you were neutral or traveling far from home you chose your colors well. The wrong color in the wrong neighborhood could mean your last day. No wonder, then, that my friends and the rare nocturnal passerby declared me crazy for my long late-night treks that traversed warring political zones. (And sometimes I did pretend to be crazy, shouting non sequiturs when I passed through especially dangerous spots, such as the place where thieves hid on the banks of a storm drain. Predators would ignore or laugh at the kid in his school uniform speaking nonsense.)
I made friends with strangers and went from being a very shy and awkward kid to being an extroverted, awkward one. The beggar, the vendor, the poor laborer—those were experienced wanderers, and they became my nighttime instructors; they knew the streets and delivered lessons on how to navigate and enjoy them. I imagined myself as a Jamaican Tom Sawyer, one moment sauntering down the streets to pick low-hanging mangoes that I could reach from the sidewalk, another moment hanging outside a street party with battling sound systems, each armed with speakers piled to create skyscrapers of heavy bass. These streets weren’t frightening. They were full of adventure when they weren’t serene. There I’d join forces with a band of merry walkers, who’d miss the last bus by mere minutes, our feet still moving as we put out our thumbs to hitchhike to spots nearer home, making jokes as vehicle after vehicle raced past us. Or I’d get lost in Mittyesque moments, my young mind imagining alternate futures. The streets had their own safety: Unlike at home, there I could be myself without fear of bodily harm. Walking became so regular and familiar that the way home became home.
The streets had their rules, and I loved the challenge of trying to master them. I learned how to be alert to surrounding dangers and nearby delights, and prided myself on recognizing telling details that my peers missed. Kingston was a map of complex, and often bizarre, cultural and political and social activity, and I appointed myself its nighttime cartographer. I’d know how to navigate away from a predatory pace, and to speed up to chat when the cadence of a gait announced friendliness. It was almost always men I saw. A lone woman walking in the middle of the night was as common a sight as Sasquatch; moonlight pedestrianism was too dangerous for her. Sometimes at night as I made my way down from hills above Kingston, I’d have the impression that the city was set on “pause” or in extreme slow motion, as that as I descended I was cutting across Jamaica’s deep social divisions. I’d make my way briskly past the mansions in the hills overlooking the city, now transformed into a carpet of dotted lights under a curtain of stars, saunter by middle-class subdivisions hidden behind high walls crowned with barbed wire, and zigzag through neighborhoods of zinc and wooden shacks crammed together and leaning like a tight-knit group of limbo dancers. With my descent came an increase in the vibrancy of street life—except when it didn’t; some poor neighborhoods had both the violent gunfights and the eerily deserted streets of the cinematic Wild West. I knew well enough to avoid those even at high noon.
I’d begun hoofing it after dark when I was 10 years old. By 13 I was rarely home before midnight, and some nights found me racing against dawn. My mother would often complain, “Mek yuh love street suh? Yuh born a hospital; yuh neva born a street.” (“Why do you love the streets so much? You were born in a hospital, not in the streets.”)
* * * *
I left Jamaica in 1996 to attend college in New Orleans, a city I’d heard called “the northernmost Caribbean city.” I wanted to discover—on foot, of course—what was Caribbean and what was American about it. Stately mansions on oak-lined streets with streetcars clanging by, and brightly colored houses that made entire blocks look festive; people in resplendent costumes dancing to funky brass bands in the middle of the street; cuisine—and aromas—that mashed up culinary traditions from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the American South; and a juxtaposition of worlds old and new, odd and familiar: Who wouldn’t want to explore this?
On my first day in the city, I went walking for a few hours to get a feel for the place and to buy supplies to transform my dormitory room from a prison bunker into a welcoming space. When some university staff members found out what I’d been up to, they warned me to restrict my walking to the places recommended as safe to tourists and the parents of freshmen. They trotted out statistics about New Orleans’s crime rate. But Kingston’s crime rate dwarfed those numbers, and I decided to ignore these well-meant cautions. A city was waiting to be discovered, and I wouldn’t let inconvenient facts get in the way. These American criminals are nothing on Kingston’s, I thought. They’re no real threat to me.
What no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.
Within days I noticed that many people on the street seemed apprehensive of me: Some gave me a circumspect glance as they approached, and then crossed the street; others, ahead, would glance behind, register my presence, and then speed up; older white women clutched their bags; young white men nervously greeted me, as if exchanging a salutation for their safety: “What’s up, bro?” On one occasion, less than a month after my arrival, I tried to help a man whose wheelchair was stuck in the middle of a crosswalk; he threatened to shoot me in the face, then asked a white pedestrian for help.
I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I had come from a majority-black country in which no one was wary of me because of my skin color. Now I wasn’t sure who was afraid of me. I was especially unprepared for the cops. They regularly stopped and bullied me, asking questions that took my guilt for granted. I’d never received what many of my African-American friends call “The Talk”: No parents had told me how to behave when I was stopped by the police, how to be as polite and cooperative as possible, no matter what they said or did to me. So I had to cobble together my own rules of engagement. Thicken my Jamaican accent. Quickly mention my college. “Accidentally” pull out my college identification card when asked for my driver’s license.
My survival tactics began well before I left my dorm. I got out of the shower with the police in my head, assembling a cop-proof wardrobe. Light-colored oxford shirt. V-neck sweater. Khaki pants. Chukkas. Sweatshirt or T-shirt with my university insignia. When I walked I regularly had my identity challenged, but I also found ways to assert it. (So I’d dress Ivy League style, but would, later on, add my Jamaican pedigree by wearing Clarks Desert Boots, the footwear of choice of Jamaican street culture.) Yet the all-American sartorial choice of white T-shirt and jeans, which many police officers see as the uniform of black troublemakers, was off-limits to me—at least, if I wanted to have the freedom of movement I desired.
In this city of exuberant streets, walking became a complex and often oppressive negotiation. I would see a white woman walking towards me at night and cross the street to reassure her that she was safe. I would forget something at home but not immediately turn around if someone was behind me, because I discovered that a sudden backtrack could cause alarm. (I had a cardinal rule: Keep a wide perimeter from people who might consider me a danger. If not, danger might visit me.) New Orleans suddenly felt more dangerous than Jamaica. The sidewalk was a minefield, and every hesitation and self-censored compensation reduced my dignity. Despite my best efforts, the streets never felt comfortably safe. Even a simple salutation was suspect.
One night, returning to the house that, eight years after my arrival, I thought I’d earned the right to call my home, I waved to a cop driving by. Moments later, I was against his car in handcuffs. When I later asked him—sheepishly, of course; any other way would have asked for bruises—why he had detained me, he said my greeting had aroused his suspicion. “No one waves to the police,” he explained. When I told friends of his response, it was my behavior, not his, that they saw as absurd. “Now why would you do a dumb thing like that?” said one. “You know better than to make nice with police.”
by Garnette Cadogan, LitHub | Read more:
Image:“Father and Son,” from Ruddy Roye’s “When Living is Protest” series.
–Fats Waller, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”
“Manhattan’s streets I saunter’d, pondering.”
–Walt Whitman, “Manhattan’s Streets I Saunter’d, Pondering”
My love for walking started in childhood, out of necessity. No thanks to a stepfather with heavy hands, I found every reason to stay away from home and was usually out—at some friend’s house or at a street party where no minor should be—until it was too late to get public transportation. So I walked.
The streets of Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1980s were often terrifying—you could, for instance, get killed if a political henchman thought you came from the wrong neighborhood, or even if you wore the wrong color. Wearing orange showed affiliation with one political party and green with the other, and if you were neutral or traveling far from home you chose your colors well. The wrong color in the wrong neighborhood could mean your last day. No wonder, then, that my friends and the rare nocturnal passerby declared me crazy for my long late-night treks that traversed warring political zones. (And sometimes I did pretend to be crazy, shouting non sequiturs when I passed through especially dangerous spots, such as the place where thieves hid on the banks of a storm drain. Predators would ignore or laugh at the kid in his school uniform speaking nonsense.)
I made friends with strangers and went from being a very shy and awkward kid to being an extroverted, awkward one. The beggar, the vendor, the poor laborer—those were experienced wanderers, and they became my nighttime instructors; they knew the streets and delivered lessons on how to navigate and enjoy them. I imagined myself as a Jamaican Tom Sawyer, one moment sauntering down the streets to pick low-hanging mangoes that I could reach from the sidewalk, another moment hanging outside a street party with battling sound systems, each armed with speakers piled to create skyscrapers of heavy bass. These streets weren’t frightening. They were full of adventure when they weren’t serene. There I’d join forces with a band of merry walkers, who’d miss the last bus by mere minutes, our feet still moving as we put out our thumbs to hitchhike to spots nearer home, making jokes as vehicle after vehicle raced past us. Or I’d get lost in Mittyesque moments, my young mind imagining alternate futures. The streets had their own safety: Unlike at home, there I could be myself without fear of bodily harm. Walking became so regular and familiar that the way home became home.The streets had their rules, and I loved the challenge of trying to master them. I learned how to be alert to surrounding dangers and nearby delights, and prided myself on recognizing telling details that my peers missed. Kingston was a map of complex, and often bizarre, cultural and political and social activity, and I appointed myself its nighttime cartographer. I’d know how to navigate away from a predatory pace, and to speed up to chat when the cadence of a gait announced friendliness. It was almost always men I saw. A lone woman walking in the middle of the night was as common a sight as Sasquatch; moonlight pedestrianism was too dangerous for her. Sometimes at night as I made my way down from hills above Kingston, I’d have the impression that the city was set on “pause” or in extreme slow motion, as that as I descended I was cutting across Jamaica’s deep social divisions. I’d make my way briskly past the mansions in the hills overlooking the city, now transformed into a carpet of dotted lights under a curtain of stars, saunter by middle-class subdivisions hidden behind high walls crowned with barbed wire, and zigzag through neighborhoods of zinc and wooden shacks crammed together and leaning like a tight-knit group of limbo dancers. With my descent came an increase in the vibrancy of street life—except when it didn’t; some poor neighborhoods had both the violent gunfights and the eerily deserted streets of the cinematic Wild West. I knew well enough to avoid those even at high noon.
I’d begun hoofing it after dark when I was 10 years old. By 13 I was rarely home before midnight, and some nights found me racing against dawn. My mother would often complain, “Mek yuh love street suh? Yuh born a hospital; yuh neva born a street.” (“Why do you love the streets so much? You were born in a hospital, not in the streets.”)
* * * *
I left Jamaica in 1996 to attend college in New Orleans, a city I’d heard called “the northernmost Caribbean city.” I wanted to discover—on foot, of course—what was Caribbean and what was American about it. Stately mansions on oak-lined streets with streetcars clanging by, and brightly colored houses that made entire blocks look festive; people in resplendent costumes dancing to funky brass bands in the middle of the street; cuisine—and aromas—that mashed up culinary traditions from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the American South; and a juxtaposition of worlds old and new, odd and familiar: Who wouldn’t want to explore this?
On my first day in the city, I went walking for a few hours to get a feel for the place and to buy supplies to transform my dormitory room from a prison bunker into a welcoming space. When some university staff members found out what I’d been up to, they warned me to restrict my walking to the places recommended as safe to tourists and the parents of freshmen. They trotted out statistics about New Orleans’s crime rate. But Kingston’s crime rate dwarfed those numbers, and I decided to ignore these well-meant cautions. A city was waiting to be discovered, and I wouldn’t let inconvenient facts get in the way. These American criminals are nothing on Kingston’s, I thought. They’re no real threat to me.
What no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.
Within days I noticed that many people on the street seemed apprehensive of me: Some gave me a circumspect glance as they approached, and then crossed the street; others, ahead, would glance behind, register my presence, and then speed up; older white women clutched their bags; young white men nervously greeted me, as if exchanging a salutation for their safety: “What’s up, bro?” On one occasion, less than a month after my arrival, I tried to help a man whose wheelchair was stuck in the middle of a crosswalk; he threatened to shoot me in the face, then asked a white pedestrian for help.
I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I had come from a majority-black country in which no one was wary of me because of my skin color. Now I wasn’t sure who was afraid of me. I was especially unprepared for the cops. They regularly stopped and bullied me, asking questions that took my guilt for granted. I’d never received what many of my African-American friends call “The Talk”: No parents had told me how to behave when I was stopped by the police, how to be as polite and cooperative as possible, no matter what they said or did to me. So I had to cobble together my own rules of engagement. Thicken my Jamaican accent. Quickly mention my college. “Accidentally” pull out my college identification card when asked for my driver’s license.
My survival tactics began well before I left my dorm. I got out of the shower with the police in my head, assembling a cop-proof wardrobe. Light-colored oxford shirt. V-neck sweater. Khaki pants. Chukkas. Sweatshirt or T-shirt with my university insignia. When I walked I regularly had my identity challenged, but I also found ways to assert it. (So I’d dress Ivy League style, but would, later on, add my Jamaican pedigree by wearing Clarks Desert Boots, the footwear of choice of Jamaican street culture.) Yet the all-American sartorial choice of white T-shirt and jeans, which many police officers see as the uniform of black troublemakers, was off-limits to me—at least, if I wanted to have the freedom of movement I desired.
In this city of exuberant streets, walking became a complex and often oppressive negotiation. I would see a white woman walking towards me at night and cross the street to reassure her that she was safe. I would forget something at home but not immediately turn around if someone was behind me, because I discovered that a sudden backtrack could cause alarm. (I had a cardinal rule: Keep a wide perimeter from people who might consider me a danger. If not, danger might visit me.) New Orleans suddenly felt more dangerous than Jamaica. The sidewalk was a minefield, and every hesitation and self-censored compensation reduced my dignity. Despite my best efforts, the streets never felt comfortably safe. Even a simple salutation was suspect.
One night, returning to the house that, eight years after my arrival, I thought I’d earned the right to call my home, I waved to a cop driving by. Moments later, I was against his car in handcuffs. When I later asked him—sheepishly, of course; any other way would have asked for bruises—why he had detained me, he said my greeting had aroused his suspicion. “No one waves to the police,” he explained. When I told friends of his response, it was my behavior, not his, that they saw as absurd. “Now why would you do a dumb thing like that?” said one. “You know better than to make nice with police.”
by Garnette Cadogan, LitHub | Read more:
Image:“Father and Son,” from Ruddy Roye’s “When Living is Protest” series.
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Marc Ribot
Guernica: Your antipiracy activism has intensified over the last few years. What is the future of independent music in the age of the Internet?
Marc Ribot: You know, the “pirate sites” themselves are only part of the problem. This is often misunderstood because when you take these [antipiracy] positions, people think that you’re yelling at them to not use pirate sites. And that’s not really the issue at all. First of all, anything that’s based on yelling at consumers is doomed from the outset. In fact, I would say anything based on moralizing to anyone is doomed from the outset. But the real story is this (and the laws dealing with this are somewhat similar in the EU and the US): in most cases, the owner of a business is responsible for criminal acts that take place on the premises of work. If somebody is found selling drugs out of a bar, perhaps the first time around, the police arrest the dealer. The second time around, they are likely to arrest the owner. If not the second, then the third. Because the law says you have to run a clean business. You get my point?
Now, the largest corporations in the US, and some of the largest corporations in the world, thrive because of the illegal acts that take place on their premises. I am talking about Google and [its subsidiary] YouTube. They make money from selling ads, but they sell ads on infringed files. These are files that are posted without the consent of, and without paying, the people who created them. Normally, you’d be allowed to arrest someone who did that, just as you would our coke dealer from the previous example. I know Germany has been able to implement more stringent laws, but in the US and many other places in the European Union (EU), there are laws that give these corporations “a safe harbor,” meaning you can’t sue them for the damage they do to you by sharing your content for free.
The technology exists to prevent this. In fact, YouTube already has a software that prevents illegal files from being uploaded or viewed. This is the reason you can watch a video in the US but not in Germany. Thousands of artists already use this option. The problem is that in order to get it, you have to sign a contract and hand over the rights to your material to YouTube.
You see, these are corporate gangsters, and why are they getting away with it? Because some of them are worth 550 billion dollars; that’s why! They havebought the politicians. But is it hurting people? Is it hurting culture? Is it hurting musicians? Not just the musicians but the engineers, the road crews, the producers, the recording studios, the people who clean the studios? Of course, it is! It’s putting a lot of people out of work. If you care about working-class music—and if you believe our culture should reflect the diversity of experiences in our society—then you might want to care about these issues too. It’s as simple as that.
See Marc Ribot: Barriers to Participation
[ed. I hope this YouTube video is Ribot-approved (how can you tell?). If you like the album, buy it. It's terrific.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)