Monday, August 28, 2017
To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining
The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you’ll be eating something else — without a second bottle of wine, because you can’t find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out.
The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.
It can track the restaurant’s duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills.
So Big Data is staging an intervention.
Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports. (...)
In Chicago, at the Michelin-starred Oriole, where 28 diners sit down each night to a $190 tasting menu, the owners, Noah and Cara Sandoval, rely on data from the Upserve system to identify their top 100 guests in terms of numbers of visits and amount spent, but that’s just the start. The system also creates a profile with every first-time reservation.
“You can’t know that someone’s going to become a regular, so you don’t necessarily keep track of those people,” Ms. Sandoval said. “But the system does.” It also tracks the top 100’s dining companions when they split the check. Upserve sends a list of credit card numbers, dates of visits and items bought; the restaurant matches each number to a name, and a search on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn provides a face to go with it.
“We’re sure to recognize them” the next time they come in, so the staff can welcome them back by name, Ms. Sandoval said. “It surprises people, in a nice way, when they didn’t make the reservation themselves.”
Even the type of credit card contributes to the dossier. If a customer pays with an airline card, a server might mention travel. If a customer is a sports fan, he will most likely get a server who is as well.
The food gets similar scrutiny. Upserve offers a “magic quadrant” feature that divides dishes into four categories — “greatest hits,” “underperformers,” “one-hit wonders” that are popular with first-timers but not with repeat visitors, and “hidden gems,” which regulars like and first-timers don’t — to help the Sandovals understand which are popular, and which prompt diners to return.
Customers who find the mining of personal data invasive can opt out, up to a point, but it requires effort: To avoid detection, they have to pay cash and not make reservations. Those who participate actively in the process get more information in return.
The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.
It can track the restaurant’s duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills.So Big Data is staging an intervention.
Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports. (...)
In Chicago, at the Michelin-starred Oriole, where 28 diners sit down each night to a $190 tasting menu, the owners, Noah and Cara Sandoval, rely on data from the Upserve system to identify their top 100 guests in terms of numbers of visits and amount spent, but that’s just the start. The system also creates a profile with every first-time reservation.
“You can’t know that someone’s going to become a regular, so you don’t necessarily keep track of those people,” Ms. Sandoval said. “But the system does.” It also tracks the top 100’s dining companions when they split the check. Upserve sends a list of credit card numbers, dates of visits and items bought; the restaurant matches each number to a name, and a search on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn provides a face to go with it.
“We’re sure to recognize them” the next time they come in, so the staff can welcome them back by name, Ms. Sandoval said. “It surprises people, in a nice way, when they didn’t make the reservation themselves.”
Even the type of credit card contributes to the dossier. If a customer pays with an airline card, a server might mention travel. If a customer is a sports fan, he will most likely get a server who is as well.
The food gets similar scrutiny. Upserve offers a “magic quadrant” feature that divides dishes into four categories — “greatest hits,” “underperformers,” “one-hit wonders” that are popular with first-timers but not with repeat visitors, and “hidden gems,” which regulars like and first-timers don’t — to help the Sandovals understand which are popular, and which prompt diners to return.
Customers who find the mining of personal data invasive can opt out, up to a point, but it requires effort: To avoid detection, they have to pay cash and not make reservations. Those who participate actively in the process get more information in return.
by Karen Stabiner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Cole Wilson
[ed. Hmm... I can't think of a better way to alienate your customers.]
Crowdfunding Disaster: Silicon Valley Startup Takes Customers’ Money, Shuts Down
A Bay Area startup that promised to give music lovers state-of-the-art wireless earphones is instead closing its doors, becoming the latest in a string of crowd-funded companies to take customers’ money and shut down without shipping a product.
San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received. The company emailed customers on Wednesday to break the bad news, directing them to a letter posted on the Kanoa website.
“This is not the outcome we had foreseen, and with the quick turn of events, we are emotionally overwhelmed,” the company’s website stated. “We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried.”
Cival Van Der Lubbe, Kanoa’s founder and CEO, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday. An email sent to the company’s main help center was not returned.
Kanoa is just the latest local crowdfunded company to disappoint customers. Last summer San Francisco-based startup Skully imploded, to the dismay of 3,000 customers who paid $1,500 each for high-tech motorcycle helmets they never received. In February, Lily Robotics, another San Francisco-based startup, filed for bankruptcy. Unlike Skully and Kanoa, Lily promised to reimburse the more than 60,000 customers who paid for but never received its camera drones.
Kanoa created some buzz when it unveiled its wireless, bluetooth enabled earphones back in 2015, before Apple had released its wireless Air Pods. In a press release announcing the product, Kanoa promised all sorts of high-tech features. Music played through the earphones was supposed to change in pace and volume as the user’s heart raced during a workout. Kanoa said users would be able to control how much ambient sound the earphones let in — listeners would be able to block out the outside world, or set the earphones to let them hear oncoming traffic while biking or walking.
Kanoa launched a pre-order campaign on its website as a way to crowdfund the company, and orders started coming in. The earphones retailed for $300, and early backers got discounts of up to 50 percent. But customers said Kanoa kept pushing back the ship date for their orders — customers who expected to have their earphones by the summer of 2016 still hadn’t received them a year later.
Then on Saturday the company suffered another blow: a scathing video product review posted on YouTube by a reviewer who goes by the online name “iTwe4kz.”
“This is trash. You don’t want to have these,” he says in the video, which had 129,000 page views Friday. “This is not a company that you want to deal with.” (...)
The company shut down four days after the review went live on YouTube. In the farewell note posted on its website, Kanoa said its investors backed out of a pending round of funding.
“We are in negotiations with investors for funding, and also large tech companies on an acquisition, while prioritizing our commitment via KANOA to you,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, without that investment, we do not have enough capital to stay operational while we find a solution.”
That means Kanoa won’t fill any more pre-orders, it said. Kanoa also let go of its employees, and let its customer support and social media channels go dark.
San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received. The company emailed customers on Wednesday to break the bad news, directing them to a letter posted on the Kanoa website.
“This is not the outcome we had foreseen, and with the quick turn of events, we are emotionally overwhelmed,” the company’s website stated. “We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried.”Cival Van Der Lubbe, Kanoa’s founder and CEO, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday. An email sent to the company’s main help center was not returned.
Kanoa is just the latest local crowdfunded company to disappoint customers. Last summer San Francisco-based startup Skully imploded, to the dismay of 3,000 customers who paid $1,500 each for high-tech motorcycle helmets they never received. In February, Lily Robotics, another San Francisco-based startup, filed for bankruptcy. Unlike Skully and Kanoa, Lily promised to reimburse the more than 60,000 customers who paid for but never received its camera drones.
Kanoa created some buzz when it unveiled its wireless, bluetooth enabled earphones back in 2015, before Apple had released its wireless Air Pods. In a press release announcing the product, Kanoa promised all sorts of high-tech features. Music played through the earphones was supposed to change in pace and volume as the user’s heart raced during a workout. Kanoa said users would be able to control how much ambient sound the earphones let in — listeners would be able to block out the outside world, or set the earphones to let them hear oncoming traffic while biking or walking.
Kanoa launched a pre-order campaign on its website as a way to crowdfund the company, and orders started coming in. The earphones retailed for $300, and early backers got discounts of up to 50 percent. But customers said Kanoa kept pushing back the ship date for their orders — customers who expected to have their earphones by the summer of 2016 still hadn’t received them a year later.
Then on Saturday the company suffered another blow: a scathing video product review posted on YouTube by a reviewer who goes by the online name “iTwe4kz.”
“This is trash. You don’t want to have these,” he says in the video, which had 129,000 page views Friday. “This is not a company that you want to deal with.” (...)
The company shut down four days after the review went live on YouTube. In the farewell note posted on its website, Kanoa said its investors backed out of a pending round of funding.
“We are in negotiations with investors for funding, and also large tech companies on an acquisition, while prioritizing our commitment via KANOA to you,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, without that investment, we do not have enough capital to stay operational while we find a solution.”
That means Kanoa won’t fill any more pre-orders, it said. Kanoa also let go of its employees, and let its customer support and social media channels go dark.
by Marissa Kendall, Mercury News | Read more:
Image: via:
[ed. I'd like some good data on the track record of crowd-funded start-ups, along with money donated to sites like GoFundMe. See also: San Francisco startup Skully a sham]
[ed. I'd like some good data on the track record of crowd-funded start-ups, along with money donated to sites like GoFundMe. See also: San Francisco startup Skully a sham]
The Biggest Misconception About Today’s College Students
You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss, spending each day moving among classes, parties and extracurricular activities. But the reality is that an increasingly small population of undergraduates enjoys that kind of life.
Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time. By contrast, a mere 0.4 percent of students in the United States attend one of the Ivies.
The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.
The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents.
These students work extremely hard to make ends meet and simultaneously get the education they need to be more stable: A two-year degree can earn students nearly 20 percent more annually than just a high school diploma.
And yet, these students are often the most shortchanged.
As open-access institutions, community colleges educate the majority of our country’s low-income, first-generation students. But public funding for community colleges is significantly less than for four-year colleges, sometimes because of explicit state policies. This means the amount that community colleges can spend on each student — to pay for faculty, support services, tutoring and facilities — is far less as well.
Tuition for low-income students can be covered by federal financial aid programs, but these students often have significant other costs — including housing, transportation, food and child care — that regularly pose obstacles to their education.
A recent Urban Institute study found that from 2011 to 2015, one in five students attending a two-year college lived in a food-insecure household. A study from the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that in 2016, 14 percent of community college students had been homeless at some point. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, where I am president, 77 percent of students live in households making less than $25,000 per year.
With financial pressures like these, studying full-time is not an option. It is not uncommon for a student to take between three and six years to graduate from a two-year associate degree program.
Even that can be a miraculous feat. At LaGuardia, many of our students start their days by taking their child to day care on the bus. Then they take the subway to college, then ride a different bus to their job, another bus to pick up their child and a final bus to go home. Once home, they still need to cook dinner, help their child with homework, tuck the child in, tidy up and complete their own college coursework.
Many of these students have jobs that are part-time and pay the minimum wage; their schedules can vary wildly, making the fragile balance of each day complex.
Being stretched so thin makes each day an ordeal. It’s no wonder that too many students drop out before graduation.
Community colleges need increased funding, and students need access to more flexible federal and state financial aid, enhanced paid internships and college work-study programs. Improved access to public supports, like food stamps and reduced public transportation fares, would also make a world of difference.
It’s not just that policy must change. Last year, more than $41 billion was given in charity to higher education, but about a quarter of that went to just 20 institutions. Community colleges, with almost half of all undergraduate students, received just a small fraction of this philanthropy. It is imperative that individuals, corporations and foundations spread their wealth and diversify where they donate their dollars.
by Gail O. Mellow, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kelsey Wroten
Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time. By contrast, a mere 0.4 percent of students in the United States attend one of the Ivies.
The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents.
These students work extremely hard to make ends meet and simultaneously get the education they need to be more stable: A two-year degree can earn students nearly 20 percent more annually than just a high school diploma.
And yet, these students are often the most shortchanged.
As open-access institutions, community colleges educate the majority of our country’s low-income, first-generation students. But public funding for community colleges is significantly less than for four-year colleges, sometimes because of explicit state policies. This means the amount that community colleges can spend on each student — to pay for faculty, support services, tutoring and facilities — is far less as well.
Tuition for low-income students can be covered by federal financial aid programs, but these students often have significant other costs — including housing, transportation, food and child care — that regularly pose obstacles to their education.
A recent Urban Institute study found that from 2011 to 2015, one in five students attending a two-year college lived in a food-insecure household. A study from the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that in 2016, 14 percent of community college students had been homeless at some point. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, where I am president, 77 percent of students live in households making less than $25,000 per year.
With financial pressures like these, studying full-time is not an option. It is not uncommon for a student to take between three and six years to graduate from a two-year associate degree program.
Even that can be a miraculous feat. At LaGuardia, many of our students start their days by taking their child to day care on the bus. Then they take the subway to college, then ride a different bus to their job, another bus to pick up their child and a final bus to go home. Once home, they still need to cook dinner, help their child with homework, tuck the child in, tidy up and complete their own college coursework.
Many of these students have jobs that are part-time and pay the minimum wage; their schedules can vary wildly, making the fragile balance of each day complex.
Being stretched so thin makes each day an ordeal. It’s no wonder that too many students drop out before graduation.
Community colleges need increased funding, and students need access to more flexible federal and state financial aid, enhanced paid internships and college work-study programs. Improved access to public supports, like food stamps and reduced public transportation fares, would also make a world of difference.
It’s not just that policy must change. Last year, more than $41 billion was given in charity to higher education, but about a quarter of that went to just 20 institutions. Community colleges, with almost half of all undergraduate students, received just a small fraction of this philanthropy. It is imperative that individuals, corporations and foundations spread their wealth and diversify where they donate their dollars.
by Gail O. Mellow, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kelsey Wroten
The Princess Myth
Royal time should move slowly and by its own laws: creeping, like the flow of chrism from a jar. But 20 ordinary years have jog-trotted by, and it’s possible to have a grownup conversation with someone who wasn’t born when Diana died. Her widower is long remarried. Her eldest son, once so like her, shows signs of developing the ponderous looks of Philip, his grand-father. Diana should be as passe as ostrich plumes: one of those royal or quasi-royal women, like Mary of Teck or Wallis Simpson or the last tsarina, whose images fade to sepia and whose bones are white as pearls. Instead, we gossip about her as if she had just left the room. We still debate how in 1981 a sweet-faced, puppy-eyed 20-year-old came to marry into the royal house. Was it a setup from the start? Did she know her fiance loved another woman? Was she complicit, or was she an innocent, garlanded for the slab and the knife?
For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse. For the anniversary of her death, the princess’s sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we learn that she was “fun” and “very caring” and “a breath of fresh air”. They speak sincerely, but they have no news. Yet there is no bar on saying what you like about her, in defiance of the evidence. Private tapes she made with her voice coach have been shown in a TV documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words. They were trailed as revealing a princess who is “candid” and “uninhibited”. Yet never has she appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant. Squirming, twitching, avoiding the camera’s eye, she describes herself hopefully as “a rebel”, on the grounds that she liked to do the opposite of everyone else. You want to veil the lens and explain: that is reaction, not rebellion. Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me”, it doesn’t means they’ll keep your secrets.
Yet royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see; Diana consulted psychics to work out what was going on. The perennial demand for them to cut costs and be more “down to earth” is futile. They are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal frequency.”
Though she was not born royal, her ancestors were ancient power-brokers, dug more deeply into these islands than the Windsors. She arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation from the hardness of its own character. As she correctly discerned, “The British people needed someone to give affection.” A soft-eyed, fertile blond, she represented conjugal and maternal love, and what other source did we have? Until Tony Blair took office as a fresh-faced Prince Charming we had female leaders, but they were old and their cupboards were bare of food and love: a queen who, even at Diana’s death, was reluctant to descend from the cold north, and a prime minister formerly known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.
The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person. Even at the beginning she was only loosely based on the young woman born Diana Spencer, and once she was engaged to the Prince of Wales she cut adrift from her modest CV. In the recent documentary Diana, Our Mother, her son Harry spoke of her as “an ordinary 20-year-old”; then checked himself, remembering she was an aristocrat. But in some ways his first thought was right. Like a farmer’s daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge – she grew up near the queen’s estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to Viscount Althorp, she wasperhaps a disappointment. The family’s previous child, a son, had died within hours of birth, and Spencer and his wife Frances had to try again for an heir. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman posits that unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store. By Diana’s cradle – where the witches and good fairies do battle – stood a friend of the Queen Mother, her maternal grandmother Ruth Fermoy. When Diana was six, Frances left her young family. Fermoy took sides against her daughter and helped Spencer get custody of his four desolate children. Later, promoted to his earldom, he remarried without telling them. Diana is said to have expressed her views by pushing her stepmother downstairs.
Diana’s private education implanted few cultural interests and no sense of their lack. She passed no public exams. But she could write a civil letter in her rounded hand, and since she didn’t have to earn a living, did it matter? In Diana: In Her Own Words, she speaks of her sense of destiny. “I knew … something profound was coming my way … I knew I was different from my friends …” Like Cinderella in the kitchen, she served an apprenticeship in humility, working as an upper-class cleaner, and in a nursery mopping up after other people’s babies. Then the prince came calling: a mature man, with a history of his own.
For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse. For the anniversary of her death, the princess’s sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we learn that she was “fun” and “very caring” and “a breath of fresh air”. They speak sincerely, but they have no news. Yet there is no bar on saying what you like about her, in defiance of the evidence. Private tapes she made with her voice coach have been shown in a TV documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words. They were trailed as revealing a princess who is “candid” and “uninhibited”. Yet never has she appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant. Squirming, twitching, avoiding the camera’s eye, she describes herself hopefully as “a rebel”, on the grounds that she liked to do the opposite of everyone else. You want to veil the lens and explain: that is reaction, not rebellion. Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me”, it doesn’t means they’ll keep your secrets.Yet royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see; Diana consulted psychics to work out what was going on. The perennial demand for them to cut costs and be more “down to earth” is futile. They are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal frequency.”
Though she was not born royal, her ancestors were ancient power-brokers, dug more deeply into these islands than the Windsors. She arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation from the hardness of its own character. As she correctly discerned, “The British people needed someone to give affection.” A soft-eyed, fertile blond, she represented conjugal and maternal love, and what other source did we have? Until Tony Blair took office as a fresh-faced Prince Charming we had female leaders, but they were old and their cupboards were bare of food and love: a queen who, even at Diana’s death, was reluctant to descend from the cold north, and a prime minister formerly known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.
The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person. Even at the beginning she was only loosely based on the young woman born Diana Spencer, and once she was engaged to the Prince of Wales she cut adrift from her modest CV. In the recent documentary Diana, Our Mother, her son Harry spoke of her as “an ordinary 20-year-old”; then checked himself, remembering she was an aristocrat. But in some ways his first thought was right. Like a farmer’s daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge – she grew up near the queen’s estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to Viscount Althorp, she wasperhaps a disappointment. The family’s previous child, a son, had died within hours of birth, and Spencer and his wife Frances had to try again for an heir. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman posits that unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store. By Diana’s cradle – where the witches and good fairies do battle – stood a friend of the Queen Mother, her maternal grandmother Ruth Fermoy. When Diana was six, Frances left her young family. Fermoy took sides against her daughter and helped Spencer get custody of his four desolate children. Later, promoted to his earldom, he remarried without telling them. Diana is said to have expressed her views by pushing her stepmother downstairs.
Diana’s private education implanted few cultural interests and no sense of their lack. She passed no public exams. But she could write a civil letter in her rounded hand, and since she didn’t have to earn a living, did it matter? In Diana: In Her Own Words, she speaks of her sense of destiny. “I knew … something profound was coming my way … I knew I was different from my friends …” Like Cinderella in the kitchen, she served an apprenticeship in humility, working as an upper-class cleaner, and in a nursery mopping up after other people’s babies. Then the prince came calling: a mature man, with a history of his own.
by Hilary Mantel, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Sunday, August 27, 2017
The Philip K Dick Book I Love Most…
You couldn’t really call me a bona fide Dickhead because I haven’t read everything Philip K Dick wrote (60-odd books, including short story collections during a relatively short career – at one point he was so prolific that he completed 11 novels in a single year). I do co-own a large selection of them, though, and in 1992 – or some time thereabouts – I attended a seminar at the ICA, hosted by Brian Aldiss (who else?) in which each title was read aloud and marked out of 10 (this was an approach established by Lawrence Sutin in his marvellous biography of the writer, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick), so that attendees could yell a riotous higher! or lower! according to their own personal predilections.
It would certainly be fair to say that in the 35 years since his early death in 1982 Dick has been openly acknowledged – nay celebrated – as one of the world’s greatest ever writers of science fiction. Sutin rightly summarises Dick’s artistic drive as an exhaustive investigation into both what is real and what is human. Dick himself claimed “the core of my writing is not art, but truth”, and – still more perplexingly: “I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist.” To a majority of his contemporaries (even in sci-fi circles) Dick was, for the most part, considered “a drug-addled nut”. One of his highs (or lows) of choice was horse tranquilliser. He married five times. He was a twin – his sister (who he insisted was a lesbian) died shortly after they were born. His life was illumined by a series of extraordinary spiritual visions.
When you are writing about Dick, there is so much to include, such abundance – so much scandal, so much complexity, so much richness. He was plainly a highly perverse individual and at some level (a funny, clever, joyous level) an outrageous bullshitter. But deny it as he might, he is a novelist – a true novelist – and a novelist of rare genius. These books aren’t simply a series of hypotheses sparsely covered in a thin pelt of character, emotion and language. They are soft and sumptuous and twirl around the reader’s calves, hissing and purring. His writing celebrates art, life, ideas (as surely all the best writing must) and, perhaps most deliriously – the inexpressible.
Early on in his writing career Dick wrote a series of straight novels (not that Dick was ever capable of straightness – he was, by nature, intrinsically curvy). They aren’t among the most celebrated of his works. But my contention is that there are several true gems among them, the shiniest of which – and for me, the most creatively inspirational, as a novelist – are Confessions of a Crap Artist and (my marginal favourite) Puttering About in a Small Land.
Crap Artist definitely has the best opening two lines, though:
“I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it because I have it bound in.”
It’s a little masterpiece (and for some reason slots into my consciousness hard upon John Kennedy Toole’s superb A Confederacy of Dunces). It was published in 1959, but Puttering (written in 1957 – when Dick was only 29) is my firm favourite. Sutin rates it – rather disconcertingly – at a shockingly measly five. I’m not sure why this is. Because I can find little to fault in it. The bare bones of the story are certainly, on initial appearances, deliberately unshowy – almost pedestrian. But this is what I love. Dick isn’t making a big deal out of anything. He is finding drama in smallness, in the margins, in tiny changes of perspective. The book is slight but transformative. And because this is not an art I have refined myself (a cat may look at a king!), I deeply envy it. I suppose there is a “Kitchen Sink” element (the timing corresponds), but there’s nothing mannered or crass about the way Dick handles his subject matter. He isn’t angry or splenetic. He is quizzical and mystified. He is – best of all – inquisitive.
In brief, the novel details the coming together of its two protagonists, Roger and Virginia Lindahl. They meet, are kind of in love, and kind of horrified by each other. They move from Washington to LA at the end of the war. We see them find work. We see Roger open a television sales and repairs shop. The Lindahls have a son with asthma who they send to a private school in the mountains. Here they meet the Bonners – Chuck and Liz. Roger and Liz commence an affair.
What I most admire about the book is the way people simply do not understand what they are doing while at the same time experiencing utter clarity. Dick’s writing is like a kind of psychological washing-up-brush – he carefully pushes its bristles up into his character’s minds and rotates exhaustively.
The reader has total access. It’s both horrifying and delirious. There are some truly demented passages. And there’s a profound sense that Dick doesn’t really give a damn. He’s not making any great claims for himself (or the novel), he’s just turning it out. It isn’t overthought or minutely considered. It is joyful and propulsive. Because this is how he writes. This is who he is. Effortlessly cool. There are ideas to spare. He throws them around like a Dame tossing Cadbury’s Minis into the crowd at a pantomime.
Such confidence! Such largesse!
I so aspire to be generous in this way. And fun. At one point Dick describes a high-pressure business meeting and says “Beth studied him as if he had managed to fart through his nose.”
Pure Dick. Come on. You gotta love it.
by Nicola Barker, Michael Moorcock, and Adam Roberts, The Guardian | Read more:
It would certainly be fair to say that in the 35 years since his early death in 1982 Dick has been openly acknowledged – nay celebrated – as one of the world’s greatest ever writers of science fiction. Sutin rightly summarises Dick’s artistic drive as an exhaustive investigation into both what is real and what is human. Dick himself claimed “the core of my writing is not art, but truth”, and – still more perplexingly: “I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist.” To a majority of his contemporaries (even in sci-fi circles) Dick was, for the most part, considered “a drug-addled nut”. One of his highs (or lows) of choice was horse tranquilliser. He married five times. He was a twin – his sister (who he insisted was a lesbian) died shortly after they were born. His life was illumined by a series of extraordinary spiritual visions.When you are writing about Dick, there is so much to include, such abundance – so much scandal, so much complexity, so much richness. He was plainly a highly perverse individual and at some level (a funny, clever, joyous level) an outrageous bullshitter. But deny it as he might, he is a novelist – a true novelist – and a novelist of rare genius. These books aren’t simply a series of hypotheses sparsely covered in a thin pelt of character, emotion and language. They are soft and sumptuous and twirl around the reader’s calves, hissing and purring. His writing celebrates art, life, ideas (as surely all the best writing must) and, perhaps most deliriously – the inexpressible.
Early on in his writing career Dick wrote a series of straight novels (not that Dick was ever capable of straightness – he was, by nature, intrinsically curvy). They aren’t among the most celebrated of his works. But my contention is that there are several true gems among them, the shiniest of which – and for me, the most creatively inspirational, as a novelist – are Confessions of a Crap Artist and (my marginal favourite) Puttering About in a Small Land.
Crap Artist definitely has the best opening two lines, though:
“I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it because I have it bound in.”
It’s a little masterpiece (and for some reason slots into my consciousness hard upon John Kennedy Toole’s superb A Confederacy of Dunces). It was published in 1959, but Puttering (written in 1957 – when Dick was only 29) is my firm favourite. Sutin rates it – rather disconcertingly – at a shockingly measly five. I’m not sure why this is. Because I can find little to fault in it. The bare bones of the story are certainly, on initial appearances, deliberately unshowy – almost pedestrian. But this is what I love. Dick isn’t making a big deal out of anything. He is finding drama in smallness, in the margins, in tiny changes of perspective. The book is slight but transformative. And because this is not an art I have refined myself (a cat may look at a king!), I deeply envy it. I suppose there is a “Kitchen Sink” element (the timing corresponds), but there’s nothing mannered or crass about the way Dick handles his subject matter. He isn’t angry or splenetic. He is quizzical and mystified. He is – best of all – inquisitive.
In brief, the novel details the coming together of its two protagonists, Roger and Virginia Lindahl. They meet, are kind of in love, and kind of horrified by each other. They move from Washington to LA at the end of the war. We see them find work. We see Roger open a television sales and repairs shop. The Lindahls have a son with asthma who they send to a private school in the mountains. Here they meet the Bonners – Chuck and Liz. Roger and Liz commence an affair.
What I most admire about the book is the way people simply do not understand what they are doing while at the same time experiencing utter clarity. Dick’s writing is like a kind of psychological washing-up-brush – he carefully pushes its bristles up into his character’s minds and rotates exhaustively.
The reader has total access. It’s both horrifying and delirious. There are some truly demented passages. And there’s a profound sense that Dick doesn’t really give a damn. He’s not making any great claims for himself (or the novel), he’s just turning it out. It isn’t overthought or minutely considered. It is joyful and propulsive. Because this is how he writes. This is who he is. Effortlessly cool. There are ideas to spare. He throws them around like a Dame tossing Cadbury’s Minis into the crowd at a pantomime.
Such confidence! Such largesse!
I so aspire to be generous in this way. And fun. At one point Dick describes a high-pressure business meeting and says “Beth studied him as if he had managed to fart through his nose.”
Pure Dick. Come on. You gotta love it.
by Nicola Barker, Michael Moorcock, and Adam Roberts, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Bryan Mayes
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Free Speech Dies in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Protesters opposing a right-wing gathering in liberal San Francisco claimed victory Saturday when the event was cancelled after city officials walled off a city park - a move that the event's organizer said was more about silencing his group's message than preventing a violent clash.
Civic leaders in San Francisco - a cradle of the free speech movement that prides itself on its tolerance - repeatedly voiced concerns that the event organized by Patriot Prayer would lead to a clash with counter-demonstrators.
Joey Gibson, who is Japanese American and leads Patriot Prayer, said his group disavows racism and hatred and wanted to promote dialogue with people who may not share its views. He cancelled a planned rally Saturday at a field under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge after he said his members received anonymous threats on social media and feared civic leaders and law enforcement would fail to protect them.
He said Saturday in a phone interview that he felt like San Francisco's Democratic leaders had shut him down. Earlier in the week, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee raised concerns that Patriot Prayer would attract hate speech and potential violence. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Democrat who represents San Francisco, called the planned rally a "white supremacist" event.
"They're definitely doing a great job of trying to make sure my message doesn't come out," Gibson said.
San Francisco officials closed the park where Gibson had planned a news conference after cancelling the rally at Crissy Field. City officials surrounded Alamo Square park with a fence and sent scores of police officers -- some in riot gear -- to keep people out. Mayor Ed Lee defended the city's response.
"If people want to have the stage in San Francisco, they better have a message that contributes to people's lives rather than find ways to hurt them," Lee asaid. "That's why certain voices found it very difficult to have their voices heard today."
[Ed. Free speech for me, but not for thee. See also: The Ugly Side of Antifa]
Civic leaders in San Francisco - a cradle of the free speech movement that prides itself on its tolerance - repeatedly voiced concerns that the event organized by Patriot Prayer would lead to a clash with counter-demonstrators.
Joey Gibson, who is Japanese American and leads Patriot Prayer, said his group disavows racism and hatred and wanted to promote dialogue with people who may not share its views. He cancelled a planned rally Saturday at a field under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge after he said his members received anonymous threats on social media and feared civic leaders and law enforcement would fail to protect them.He said Saturday in a phone interview that he felt like San Francisco's Democratic leaders had shut him down. Earlier in the week, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee raised concerns that Patriot Prayer would attract hate speech and potential violence. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Democrat who represents San Francisco, called the planned rally a "white supremacist" event.
"They're definitely doing a great job of trying to make sure my message doesn't come out," Gibson said.
San Francisco officials closed the park where Gibson had planned a news conference after cancelling the rally at Crissy Field. City officials surrounded Alamo Square park with a fence and sent scores of police officers -- some in riot gear -- to keep people out. Mayor Ed Lee defended the city's response.
"If people want to have the stage in San Francisco, they better have a message that contributes to people's lives rather than find ways to hurt them," Lee asaid. "That's why certain voices found it very difficult to have their voices heard today."
by Paul Elias and Sudhin Thanawala, AP | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia[Ed. Free speech for me, but not for thee. See also: The Ugly Side of Antifa]
Friday, August 25, 2017
AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand
Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”
Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.
This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.
“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that’s been observed again, and again, and again. “Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”
So should we let our software do the same thing? Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought.
The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.
Facebook ultimately opted to require its negotiation bots to speak in plain old English. “Our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” says Mike Lewis, research scientist at FAIR. Facebook isn’t alone in that perspective. When I inquired to Microsoft about computer-to-computer languages, a spokesperson clarified that Microsoft was more interested in human-to-computer speech. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all also focusing incredible energies on developing conversational personalities for human consumption. They’re the next wave of user interface, like the mouse and keyboard for the AI era.
The other issue, as Facebook admits, is that it has no way of truly understanding any divergent computer language. “It’s important to remember, there aren’t bilingual speakers of AI and human languages,” says Batra. We already don’t generally understand how complex AIs think because we can’t really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse.
But at the same time, it feels shortsighted, doesn’t it? If we can build software that can speak to other software more efficiently, shouldn’t we use that? Couldn’t there be some benefit?
Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.
This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences. “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that’s been observed again, and again, and again. “Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”
So should we let our software do the same thing? Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought.
The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.
Facebook ultimately opted to require its negotiation bots to speak in plain old English. “Our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” says Mike Lewis, research scientist at FAIR. Facebook isn’t alone in that perspective. When I inquired to Microsoft about computer-to-computer languages, a spokesperson clarified that Microsoft was more interested in human-to-computer speech. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all also focusing incredible energies on developing conversational personalities for human consumption. They’re the next wave of user interface, like the mouse and keyboard for the AI era.
The other issue, as Facebook admits, is that it has no way of truly understanding any divergent computer language. “It’s important to remember, there aren’t bilingual speakers of AI and human languages,” says Batra. We already don’t generally understand how complex AIs think because we can’t really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse.
But at the same time, it feels shortsighted, doesn’t it? If we can build software that can speak to other software more efficiently, shouldn’t we use that? Couldn’t there be some benefit?
Because, again, we absolutely can lead machines to develop their own languages. Facebook has three published papers proving it. “It’s definitely possible, it’s possible that [language] can be compressed, not just to save characters, but compressed to a form that it could express a sophisticated thought,” says Batra. Machines can converse with any baseline building blocks they’re offered. That might start with human vocabulary, as with Facebook’s negotiation bots. Or it could start with numbers, or binary codes. But as machines develop meanings, these symbols become “tokens”–they’re imbued with rich meanings. As Dauphin points out, machines might not think as you or I do, but tokens allow them to exchange incredibly complex thoughts through the simplest of symbols. The way I think about it is with algebra: If A + B = C, the “A” could encapsulate almost anything. But to a computer, what “A” can mean is so much bigger than what that “A” can mean to a person, because computers have no outright limit on processing power.
“It’s perfectly possible for a special token to mean a very complicated thought,” says Batra. “The reason why humans have this idea of decomposition, breaking ideas into simpler concepts, it’s because we have a limit to cognition.” Computers don’t need to simplify concepts. They have the raw horsepower to process them.
“It’s perfectly possible for a special token to mean a very complicated thought,” says Batra. “The reason why humans have this idea of decomposition, breaking ideas into simpler concepts, it’s because we have a limit to cognition.” Computers don’t need to simplify concepts. They have the raw horsepower to process them.
by Mark Wilson, Co.Design | Read more:
Image: Nikiteev_Konstantin/iStock, Zozulinskyi/iStock
[ed. No one (except possibly design engineers and coders) understands how technology works these days. Now AI is developing it's own language? Great. Put me firmly in the 'AI is going to kill us all' camp.]
Fish Spill
The Lummi Nation is marshaling a mop-up of thousands of fugitive Atlantic salmon in the tribe’s territorial waters, and the Swinomish chairman has called for a shutdown of the farmed-salmon industry in Puget Sound after last weekend’s spill. (...)
“These fish are headed to every river in Puget Sound,” Cladoosby said. “We have been saying all along it was not a question of if, but when, this would happen.
“The wild salmon stocks are already endangered. It is time to shut these operations down. Period.”
Meanwhile, the Lummi Nation has declared a state of emergency and is paying fish buyers to take the Atlantic salmon brought in by their fishermen, said Merle Jefferson, director of natural resources for the tribe.
Jefferson declined to say how much the tribe is paying. “It is not going to be cheap, that is all I can say,” he said. “It’s just like an oil spill, we are trying to contain it as best we can.” He said the tribe would be testing some fish for disease, and freezing the rest.
With wild salmon runs already depressed, the tribe does not want native fish subjected to competition for food from the Atlantic salmon or potentially exposed to disease, Jefferson said. The farmed Atlantic salmon also have made their way into the Nooksack River, where Lummi fishermen have had treaty-protected fisheries for generations.
“We are concerned about impact on the spawning grounds,” said Timothy Ballew II, chairman of the Lummi Indian Business Council. “That could have lasting impacts on the future runs. This needs to be taken seriously. There are currently chinook in the river, and coho on the way. Our habitat is already in fragile state and adding this to the mix does not help.”
The tribe felt pressed to pay buyers to take the fish because some fishermen have had trouble selling them. The fish were treated a year ago for yellowmouth, a bacterial infection, and some of the fish also have deformed mouths. It is not uncommon for farmed fish to have deformities because of living in confined conditions in pens, noted Ron Warren, assistant director at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW).
The disaster occurred over the weekend, releasing thousands of farmed Atlantic salmon, an invasive species, into Puget Sound waters from a fish farm owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture Pacific at Cypress Island.
There were 305,000 fish in the pen that collapsed. The company still has no count of the number of escaped fish, but company spokeswoman Nell Halse said Wednesday it is a far greater number than the few thousand initially stated by the company. Neither the company nor the WDFW made any public statement about the accident until Tuesday afternoon, when the state’s response was to urge fishermen in a news release to go fishing.
The department Thursday afternoon asked fishermen to report their catch online to help the state get a handle on how far the fish are dispersing.
“The state’s response is a failure,” Ballew said. “We need to get these fish out of the water to protect our fish habitat. It is apparent that we have to clean up this mess.” (...)
The disaster comes as the state Department of Ecology, which considers the spilled fish a pollutant, is working with a variety of partners to update the state’s regulation of fish farms, some of which date to the 1980s and “need to be modernized,” according to the department.
Washington is the only West Coast state with an open-water Atlantic salmon farming industry. Alaska and California ban such operations, and while Oregon does not disallow them, none currently operate in the state.
[ed. See also: Please Go Fishing]
“These fish are headed to every river in Puget Sound,” Cladoosby said. “We have been saying all along it was not a question of if, but when, this would happen.
“The wild salmon stocks are already endangered. It is time to shut these operations down. Period.”
Meanwhile, the Lummi Nation has declared a state of emergency and is paying fish buyers to take the Atlantic salmon brought in by their fishermen, said Merle Jefferson, director of natural resources for the tribe.Jefferson declined to say how much the tribe is paying. “It is not going to be cheap, that is all I can say,” he said. “It’s just like an oil spill, we are trying to contain it as best we can.” He said the tribe would be testing some fish for disease, and freezing the rest.
With wild salmon runs already depressed, the tribe does not want native fish subjected to competition for food from the Atlantic salmon or potentially exposed to disease, Jefferson said. The farmed Atlantic salmon also have made their way into the Nooksack River, where Lummi fishermen have had treaty-protected fisheries for generations.
“We are concerned about impact on the spawning grounds,” said Timothy Ballew II, chairman of the Lummi Indian Business Council. “That could have lasting impacts on the future runs. This needs to be taken seriously. There are currently chinook in the river, and coho on the way. Our habitat is already in fragile state and adding this to the mix does not help.”
The tribe felt pressed to pay buyers to take the fish because some fishermen have had trouble selling them. The fish were treated a year ago for yellowmouth, a bacterial infection, and some of the fish also have deformed mouths. It is not uncommon for farmed fish to have deformities because of living in confined conditions in pens, noted Ron Warren, assistant director at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW).
The disaster occurred over the weekend, releasing thousands of farmed Atlantic salmon, an invasive species, into Puget Sound waters from a fish farm owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture Pacific at Cypress Island.
There were 305,000 fish in the pen that collapsed. The company still has no count of the number of escaped fish, but company spokeswoman Nell Halse said Wednesday it is a far greater number than the few thousand initially stated by the company. Neither the company nor the WDFW made any public statement about the accident until Tuesday afternoon, when the state’s response was to urge fishermen in a news release to go fishing.
The department Thursday afternoon asked fishermen to report their catch online to help the state get a handle on how far the fish are dispersing.
“The state’s response is a failure,” Ballew said. “We need to get these fish out of the water to protect our fish habitat. It is apparent that we have to clean up this mess.” (...)
The disaster comes as the state Department of Ecology, which considers the spilled fish a pollutant, is working with a variety of partners to update the state’s regulation of fish farms, some of which date to the 1980s and “need to be modernized,” according to the department.
Washington is the only West Coast state with an open-water Atlantic salmon farming industry. Alaska and California ban such operations, and while Oregon does not disallow them, none currently operate in the state.
by Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times[ed. See also: Please Go Fishing]
Selling Social Justice
It should be obvious that having large for-profit media institutions operate yields disastrous results. As with other markets, if a journalistic institution is out to make money, it will sell what people can be convinced to buy rather than what will actually do them any good. And since we are all weak and easily distracted by gossip, fearmongering, and sleaze, we will be given disproportionate amounts of gossip, fearmongering, and sleaze. The pressure for institutions to get as many viewers/readers as possible has had pernicious consequences in the Trump Era, since it’s hard to get people to pay attention to serious issues when they could be watching the antics and drama of the Trump Show, which is—let’s be honest—the most entertaining thing on television. CNN and MSNBC produce nonstop noisy Trump coverage, and are getting their highest ratings in years.
Of course, having a parade of rubbish on television is nothing especially new. Donald Trump may have made it worse, but it’s not like CNN has ever been watchable. And the harmful results of having journalism mixed with business have been evident since at least the time of the Spanish American war. But in a new report about the progressive commentary website Mic, we can see a further troubling dimension of the profit problem: its potential to exploit and thereby corrode and cheapen the ideal of social justice.
Mic recently announced that it would be laying off two dozen staffers, as part of a pivot to video, the infamous process by which moribund journalistic institutions desperately attempt to save themselves by eliminating text-based content, on the theory that this is what millennials want. (As a hip millennial magazine, Current Affairs recently rolled out its own pivot to video.) Writing for The Outline, Adrianne Jeffries surveys the website’s history, from its beginnings as a bland purveyor of D.C. conventional wisdom called PolicyMic to its emergence as one of the foremost online voices of the “social justice” movement, garnering a huge audience by pushing politically progressive takes on the news. Mic swiftly became notorious for the tenor of its condemnations of problematic things, becoming, in the words of one former staffer, the place where millennials could go each day to find out “What are we supposed to be outraged about?” As Jeffries summarizes:
Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman’s Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We’re Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”
But according to the former employees Jeffries spoke to, much of this was deployed cynically. Mic’s founders, Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, “did not believe the things that their staffers were hired to write about.” In fact, their approach to social justice issues was sometimes nakedly mercenary: when pitched a story, one asked about the subject of the aritcle “But is she black? Is she black?” Mic stories had a formula: “In One Perfect Tweet, X” or “Celebrity X Just Said X About Issue X, Here’s Why That’s Important.” As it grew, the site was publishing between 50 and 100 stories per day, with 2500 writers, and “individual stories kept going viral, pulling in 2 million, 3 million, 5 million unique visitors per piece.” Microsoft, Cadillac and GE signed up to run “branded content” on the site, a.k.a. adverts disguised as articles.
While the site’s founders would claim that it was trying to “inform and empower our generation to have an impact,” its staff saw it as trying to “commodify people’s feelings about race and gender.” There was a “fixation on traffic” that led to “reductive headlines [that catered] to an echo chamber.” The outrage was always ratcheted “up to 11,” and while the site often promoted serious progressive causes and drew attention to Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders campaign, it was clear that the chief task was the pursuit of clicks. Every time the site “attempted to reinvent itself as ‘real journalism,’” the founders would “get spooked when traffic dropped and return to the low-hanging fruit.” Staff members, many of whom actually believed in things, felt used.
Jeffries’ report on Mic is disturbing, because it shows how “exploiting your audience’s basest temptations” is not just limited to tapping into people’s lurid interest in celebrities and gore. It can also mean manipulating their most deeply held moral convictions. You know a person is interested in making the world a better place, and bringing about race and gender equality. And you realize that there’s money to be made by selling them the feeling of having made the world a better place and brought about greater race and gender equality. The consumer can get angry at today’s Problematic Thing and feel as if they have participated in the struggle against the world’s injustices. The company reaps advertising dollars from Cadillac and GE.
This isn’t just crassly manipulative. It’s actively harmful to the cause of social justice. First, it takes the fight from the material world to the online world, further turning politics into what Adolph Reed has termed a cargo cult, addressing injustices through discourse rather than action. Second, it makes people’s anger blind and evenly-distributed. As a former Mic employee told Jeffries, “if everything is an outrage nothing is an outrage.” So Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of wearing gray T-shirts is lumped in with mass incarceration as one of the world’s many problematic things. From another employee: “Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you’re trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms.”
It’s important to stress that these employees believed strongly in social justice. And it’s precisely because they believed in it that they became uncomfortable with a business model that tried to find things to get people upset about, rather than things that people should care about.
Of course, having a parade of rubbish on television is nothing especially new. Donald Trump may have made it worse, but it’s not like CNN has ever been watchable. And the harmful results of having journalism mixed with business have been evident since at least the time of the Spanish American war. But in a new report about the progressive commentary website Mic, we can see a further troubling dimension of the profit problem: its potential to exploit and thereby corrode and cheapen the ideal of social justice.Mic recently announced that it would be laying off two dozen staffers, as part of a pivot to video, the infamous process by which moribund journalistic institutions desperately attempt to save themselves by eliminating text-based content, on the theory that this is what millennials want. (As a hip millennial magazine, Current Affairs recently rolled out its own pivot to video.) Writing for The Outline, Adrianne Jeffries surveys the website’s history, from its beginnings as a bland purveyor of D.C. conventional wisdom called PolicyMic to its emergence as one of the foremost online voices of the “social justice” movement, garnering a huge audience by pushing politically progressive takes on the news. Mic swiftly became notorious for the tenor of its condemnations of problematic things, becoming, in the words of one former staffer, the place where millennials could go each day to find out “What are we supposed to be outraged about?” As Jeffries summarizes:
Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman’s Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We’re Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”
But according to the former employees Jeffries spoke to, much of this was deployed cynically. Mic’s founders, Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, “did not believe the things that their staffers were hired to write about.” In fact, their approach to social justice issues was sometimes nakedly mercenary: when pitched a story, one asked about the subject of the aritcle “But is she black? Is she black?” Mic stories had a formula: “In One Perfect Tweet, X” or “Celebrity X Just Said X About Issue X, Here’s Why That’s Important.” As it grew, the site was publishing between 50 and 100 stories per day, with 2500 writers, and “individual stories kept going viral, pulling in 2 million, 3 million, 5 million unique visitors per piece.” Microsoft, Cadillac and GE signed up to run “branded content” on the site, a.k.a. adverts disguised as articles.
While the site’s founders would claim that it was trying to “inform and empower our generation to have an impact,” its staff saw it as trying to “commodify people’s feelings about race and gender.” There was a “fixation on traffic” that led to “reductive headlines [that catered] to an echo chamber.” The outrage was always ratcheted “up to 11,” and while the site often promoted serious progressive causes and drew attention to Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders campaign, it was clear that the chief task was the pursuit of clicks. Every time the site “attempted to reinvent itself as ‘real journalism,’” the founders would “get spooked when traffic dropped and return to the low-hanging fruit.” Staff members, many of whom actually believed in things, felt used.
Jeffries’ report on Mic is disturbing, because it shows how “exploiting your audience’s basest temptations” is not just limited to tapping into people’s lurid interest in celebrities and gore. It can also mean manipulating their most deeply held moral convictions. You know a person is interested in making the world a better place, and bringing about race and gender equality. And you realize that there’s money to be made by selling them the feeling of having made the world a better place and brought about greater race and gender equality. The consumer can get angry at today’s Problematic Thing and feel as if they have participated in the struggle against the world’s injustices. The company reaps advertising dollars from Cadillac and GE.
This isn’t just crassly manipulative. It’s actively harmful to the cause of social justice. First, it takes the fight from the material world to the online world, further turning politics into what Adolph Reed has termed a cargo cult, addressing injustices through discourse rather than action. Second, it makes people’s anger blind and evenly-distributed. As a former Mic employee told Jeffries, “if everything is an outrage nothing is an outrage.” So Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of wearing gray T-shirts is lumped in with mass incarceration as one of the world’s many problematic things. From another employee: “Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you’re trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms.”
It’s important to stress that these employees believed strongly in social justice. And it’s precisely because they believed in it that they became uncomfortable with a business model that tried to find things to get people upset about, rather than things that people should care about.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Mic
Thursday, August 24, 2017
There Are No More Low-Priced Homes
Sales of both newly built and existing homes fell unexpectedly in July, and while it's just one month's data, it may be a signal that the housing market has hit an insurmountable hurdle. It is just plain too expensive. Home prices are higher at virtually every price point, but the gains are biggest at the low end where demand is highest.
The median price of a home sold in July hit $258,300, the highest July price on record, according to the National Association of Realtors. The Realtors divide sales figures into six different price "buckets" in their monthly report. Sales in the range of $100,000 or below were down 14 percent compared with a year ago, while sales of million-dollar and higher homes jumped nearly 20 percent.
More telling is that at the start of 2013, when home prices were just beginning to bounce off the bottom of the housing crash, the share of homes sold above $500,000 was just 9 percent of all sales. Today that share is more than 14 percent. The share of lowest-priced home sales today is less than half of what it was then as well.
"On the lower end, there is virtually no property at a very low price level anymore," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. "The same property has been moved up to a different price bucket just because the prices have been rising strongly, over 40 percent price appreciation in the past five years. We are not getting the transactions on the lower end because there is virtually no inventory on the lower end."
The median price of a home sold in July hit $258,300, the highest July price on record, according to the National Association of Realtors. The Realtors divide sales figures into six different price "buckets" in their monthly report. Sales in the range of $100,000 or below were down 14 percent compared with a year ago, while sales of million-dollar and higher homes jumped nearly 20 percent.More telling is that at the start of 2013, when home prices were just beginning to bounce off the bottom of the housing crash, the share of homes sold above $500,000 was just 9 percent of all sales. Today that share is more than 14 percent. The share of lowest-priced home sales today is less than half of what it was then as well.
"On the lower end, there is virtually no property at a very low price level anymore," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. "The same property has been moved up to a different price bucket just because the prices have been rising strongly, over 40 percent price appreciation in the past five years. We are not getting the transactions on the lower end because there is virtually no inventory on the lower end."
by Diana Olick, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Getty
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Eliminating the Human
I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction. This tendency is, I suspect, not a bug—it’s a feature. We might think Amazon was about making books available to us that we couldn’t find locally—and it was, and what a brilliant idea—but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human contact.
The consumer technology I am talking about doesn’t claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal, even if it was not aimed at consciously. Judging by the evidence, that conclusion seems inescapable.
This then, is the new norm. Most of the tech news we get barraged with is about algorithms, AI, robots, and self-driving cars, all of which fit this pattern. I am not saying that such developments are not efficient and convenient; this is not a judgment. I am simply noticing a pattern and wondering if, in recognizing that pattern, we might realize that it is only one trajectory of many. There are other possible roads we could be going down, and the one we’re on is not inevitable or the only one; it has been (possibly unconsciously) chosen.
I realize I’m making some wild and crazy assumptions and generalizations with this proposal—but I can claim to be, or to have been, in the camp that would identify with the unacknowledged desire to limit human interaction. I grew up happy but also found many social interactions extremely uncomfortable. I often asked myself if there were rules somewhere that I hadn’t been told, rules that would explain it all to me. I still sometimes have social niceties “explained” to me. I’m often happy going to a restaurant alone and reading. I wouldn’t want to have to do that all the time, but I have no problem with it—though I am sometimes aware of looks that say “Poor man, he has no friends.” So I believe I can claim some insight into where this unspoken urge might come from.
Human interaction is often perceived, from an engineer’s mind-set, as complicated, inefficient, noisy, and slow. Part of making something “frictionless” is getting the human part out of the way. The point is not that making a world to accommodate this mind-set is bad, but that when one has as much power over the rest of the world as the tech sector does over folks who might not share that worldview, there is the risk of a strange imbalance. The tech world is predominantly male—very much so. Testosterone combined with a drive to eliminate as much interaction with real humans as possible for the sake of “simplicity and efficiency”—do the math, and there’s the future.
The consumer technology I am talking about doesn’t claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal, even if it was not aimed at consciously. Judging by the evidence, that conclusion seems inescapable.
This then, is the new norm. Most of the tech news we get barraged with is about algorithms, AI, robots, and self-driving cars, all of which fit this pattern. I am not saying that such developments are not efficient and convenient; this is not a judgment. I am simply noticing a pattern and wondering if, in recognizing that pattern, we might realize that it is only one trajectory of many. There are other possible roads we could be going down, and the one we’re on is not inevitable or the only one; it has been (possibly unconsciously) chosen.I realize I’m making some wild and crazy assumptions and generalizations with this proposal—but I can claim to be, or to have been, in the camp that would identify with the unacknowledged desire to limit human interaction. I grew up happy but also found many social interactions extremely uncomfortable. I often asked myself if there were rules somewhere that I hadn’t been told, rules that would explain it all to me. I still sometimes have social niceties “explained” to me. I’m often happy going to a restaurant alone and reading. I wouldn’t want to have to do that all the time, but I have no problem with it—though I am sometimes aware of looks that say “Poor man, he has no friends.” So I believe I can claim some insight into where this unspoken urge might come from.
Human interaction is often perceived, from an engineer’s mind-set, as complicated, inefficient, noisy, and slow. Part of making something “frictionless” is getting the human part out of the way. The point is not that making a world to accommodate this mind-set is bad, but that when one has as much power over the rest of the world as the tech sector does over folks who might not share that worldview, there is the risk of a strange imbalance. The tech world is predominantly male—very much so. Testosterone combined with a drive to eliminate as much interaction with real humans as possible for the sake of “simplicity and efficiency”—do the math, and there’s the future.
by David Byrne, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: Rolling Stone
Louise Linton's Guide to Fall Fashion for Poors
“Louise Linton, the labels-loving wife of Steven Mnuchin, replied condescendingly to an Instagram poster about her lifestyle and belittled the woman, Jenni Miller, a mother of three from Portland, Ore., for having less money than she does.” — New York Times, 8/22/17
Greetings #peasants, it’s me, Louise Linton, in a beautiful #hermesscarf and #tomford sunnies. You may know my husband, Steve Mnuchin, America’s Secretary of Treasure. Or you may be familiar with my work as a film star, from my turn as Samantha in Crew 2 Crew to 2013’s The Power of Few, where I played the role of “Cory’s Mother” #crew2crew #corysmom. I am also #rich, and probably paid more taxes on my #farragamo pants than you have in your entire worthless life.
Anyway, I found a spare moment between my annual three weeks of employment to put my diamond-studded #carandache pen to paper and write some fall fashion tips for the #greatunwashedmasses. Consider it yet another handout from me to you.
First off, that funky patterned #versace blouse may have gotten you through a summer of #leeching off the goodwill of the donor class, but now that fall is rolling around, it’s time to go understated. Try pairing a dark #ysl cashmere with a #givenchy suede jacket, or #burberry if you’re on a budget. #parasites
Don’t worry ladies, unlike my villa in #cabosanlucas, athleisure isn’t just for summer. This September onward, stay cool and comfortable in a pair of #gucci mesh-cut leggings and #marcjacobs sneakers. You’ll look downright #cute as you desperately jog away from the kinds of #sacrifices my loving husband and I have made for this country.
I know what you’re thinking – how can I grab even more out of silver screen #legend Louise Linton’s pockets, and what about makeup? A maroon or burgundy lip by #dior is my go-to, and should be yours too. It contrasts beautifully with any skin tone, from #porcelain to #ivory to #shell. And remember, only some people deserve to have nice things! I learned that while writing my memoir, In Congo’s Shadow, about my time in #Africa, a place where people do not even have basic amenities like #prada driving gloves and #dolce leopard-print handbags.
People are going to remember 2017 for just one thing: leather. And for genuine Italian #leather, you can’t do better than #cesarepaciotti, founded in 1980, the same year my husband got into Yale, and I was born. Have you even heard of Yale, you gluttonous fucking freeloader? #takethehighroad
For every fashion #do there’s a fashion #dont. First of all, don’t overdo it on the black – it makes you look old. Instead, keep it as youthful as possible with a dark gray #fendi vest and lighter #chanel accents. I know deep down Steve will replace me eventually. Second, don’t cheap out on the jewelry. When I’m staring at the reflection of my autumn #rosegold necklace in my #infinitypool, contemplating the ever-widening pit that is a myopic existence defined by greed and unmitigated materialism, you won’t catch me in anything less than #tiffanyandco. And here’s the biggest no-no I can give folks like you: for the love of God, do not breed! #mnugenics
Oh, and please check out my film Odious later this year; I believe I am in one of the scenes.
Greetings #peasants, it’s me, Louise Linton, in a beautiful #hermesscarf and #tomford sunnies. You may know my husband, Steve Mnuchin, America’s Secretary of Treasure. Or you may be familiar with my work as a film star, from my turn as Samantha in Crew 2 Crew to 2013’s The Power of Few, where I played the role of “Cory’s Mother” #crew2crew #corysmom. I am also #rich, and probably paid more taxes on my #farragamo pants than you have in your entire worthless life.
Anyway, I found a spare moment between my annual three weeks of employment to put my diamond-studded #carandache pen to paper and write some fall fashion tips for the #greatunwashedmasses. Consider it yet another handout from me to you.
First off, that funky patterned #versace blouse may have gotten you through a summer of #leeching off the goodwill of the donor class, but now that fall is rolling around, it’s time to go understated. Try pairing a dark #ysl cashmere with a #givenchy suede jacket, or #burberry if you’re on a budget. #parasites
Don’t worry ladies, unlike my villa in #cabosanlucas, athleisure isn’t just for summer. This September onward, stay cool and comfortable in a pair of #gucci mesh-cut leggings and #marcjacobs sneakers. You’ll look downright #cute as you desperately jog away from the kinds of #sacrifices my loving husband and I have made for this country.I know what you’re thinking – how can I grab even more out of silver screen #legend Louise Linton’s pockets, and what about makeup? A maroon or burgundy lip by #dior is my go-to, and should be yours too. It contrasts beautifully with any skin tone, from #porcelain to #ivory to #shell. And remember, only some people deserve to have nice things! I learned that while writing my memoir, In Congo’s Shadow, about my time in #Africa, a place where people do not even have basic amenities like #prada driving gloves and #dolce leopard-print handbags.
People are going to remember 2017 for just one thing: leather. And for genuine Italian #leather, you can’t do better than #cesarepaciotti, founded in 1980, the same year my husband got into Yale, and I was born. Have you even heard of Yale, you gluttonous fucking freeloader? #takethehighroad
For every fashion #do there’s a fashion #dont. First of all, don’t overdo it on the black – it makes you look old. Instead, keep it as youthful as possible with a dark gray #fendi vest and lighter #chanel accents. I know deep down Steve will replace me eventually. Second, don’t cheap out on the jewelry. When I’m staring at the reflection of my autumn #rosegold necklace in my #infinitypool, contemplating the ever-widening pit that is a myopic existence defined by greed and unmitigated materialism, you won’t catch me in anything less than #tiffanyandco. And here’s the biggest no-no I can give folks like you: for the love of God, do not breed! #mnugenics
Oh, and please check out my film Odious later this year; I believe I am in one of the scenes.
by Ziyad Gower, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: Twitter
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