Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
[To the tune of Pablo Casals, “Adagio and Allegro in A-flat major, op. 70,” from the album “Concert at the White House [Limited Edition] [Japan]“.]
At the Institute, a couple of us have been talking about the declining perceived value of anonymity as one of the big impacts of Web 2.0. Social software (however you want to define that slippery term) encourages sociability by giving people stable identities, even if they needn't be identities that track back to a person in the physical world.
I think one of the consequences of the growing centrality of online identity is a growing recognition of how anonymity didn't work online: while there's an argument that it allowed marginal people to be heard in online conversations that they never could have joined in real life, it also served as a cover for- or even promoted- bad behavior, as this t-shirt succinctly put it:
[from Penny Arcade Store]
I was thinking about this recently while driving on the freeway, and having to put up with various drivers doing 80, occasionally passing saner drivers by zipping onto the breakdown lane. One of the reasons this kind of behavior happens on the highway is that if you do something bad on the highways, you can essentially drive away from the consequences of your actions. The odds are incredibly small that you'll be chased down, much less have anyone remember you at a time when they can do something to bring you to account. Contrast this to a small town where everyone recognizes your car, sees you in the coffee shop, and damn well is going to have a word with you if you cut them off on the road.
[via ack/nak]
Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, internet
This. In black. From a little leather company in Idaho.
Update: Though Paul says to get it in the original English Kip, without the dye.
[h/t to Paul Saffo]
Technorati Tags: media, moleskine
…that Alberto Gonzales was married to the actress who played Jimmy Smit’s wife on The West Wing (and did a darned good job of it, I must add)?
[via TPM]
Must… rebuild… fiction-reality… firewall…
And for a lunch that took place during a visit in which AG is submitting his resignation to a supposedly reluctant president, don’t they all look strangely jolly?
[To the tune of Gary Numan, “Are Friends Electric?,” from the album “Scarred“.]
…what with Gonzales’ resignation, and Sen. Larry Craig’s bust for solicitation in a Minnesota men’s restroom, but I’m being strong. Of course, it’s not yet the end of the day.
Kudos to Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), who released a statement saying, in part, “Alberto Gonzales is the first Attorney General who thought the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth were three different things.” That’s not just cruel: that’s Dorothy Parker-level brilliant.
[To the tune of The Doors, “The End,” from the album “The Doors“.]
Technorati Tags: politics
Futurists love stories of unintended consequences. I don't think there are many disciplines whose practitioners traffic in anecdotes that appear to undermine their own credibility, but professional futurists are nothing if not modest about their abilities to predict the future, and tend instead to emphasize the contingency of any forecast, and the role that human agency and choice in shaping the future. (An alternate explanation is that we're just masochistic.) Stories about unintended consequences are warnings about the non-deterministic, unpredictable nature of the future.
So I was very interested to read about a recent study arguing that a mutation that made our (i.e., Homo sapiens') ancestors immune to certain retroviruses is partly responsible for our susceptibility to HIV:
The ability of a virus to cause disease in one host but not another is a poorly understood but common phenomenon. Scientists have recently found the remnants of a virus present in the genomes of chimpanzees and gorillas but absent in humans. Humans, it appears, evolved resistance to this virus millions of years ago. Paradoxically, however, the evolution of resistance to that now extinct virus may have made us more susceptible to HIV today.
Scientists have been studying a retrovirus called PtERV, remnants of which can be found in the genome of chimps. From what they can tell, there were several PtERV epidemics about three million years ago, and the genomes of chimps and other great apes still cary fragments of PtERV. Humans, however, don't have it.
Why? It appears that our ancestors developed a resistance to it. "The PtERV virus," the Guardian explains, "can only successfully infect an animal if it avoids destruction by a protein called TRIM5alpha… [which] acts a kind of gatekeeper for the cell." In apes, that protein does a poor job of blocking PtERV; the human version, in contrast, does quite well.
However, there's a catch.
HIV belongs to the same family of retroviruses as PtERV, so the scientists were also interested in finding out whether the gatekeeping activity of the protein would keep out the Aids virus. What they found was that although the modern human TRIM5alpha protein was very effective at blocking the ape virus, it was very poor at blocking HIV infection. Conversely, the ape form of the gatekeeping protein blocked HIV infection but allowed in the PtERV virus. It seems that when one door was closed to infection, another one was opened.
In other words,
That mutation came at a hidden cost. It may have saved our ancestors from extinction, but it cast a shadow into the 20th century when a new virus, HIV, emerged. The gene that saved our ancestors from the ancient viral scourge provided little protection against the new virus.
It sounds like a song by They Might Be Giants (whose children's music is pretty outstanding), but it's actually "a new book by Ian Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at Yale," which describes
a powerful trend that will shape the economy for years to come: the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information. Those who control and manipulate this data will be the masters of the new economic universe. Ayres calls them "Super Crunchers," which is also the title of his book, the latest attempt to siphon off a bit of the buzz that surrounds the hugely successful "Freakonomics." In fields from criminal law (where statistical projections of recidivism are taking discretion away from judges and parole boards) to oenophilia (where a formula involving temperature and rainfall is a better predictor of the quality of a vintage than the palates of the most vaunted experts), "intuitivists" are on the defensive against the Super Crunchers.
Why should we care about this? After all, if algorithms can help you find cool books or movies, shouldn't this be embraced? Well, there's an unanticipated consequence:
Increasingly, jobs that used to call for independent judgment, especially about other people, are being routinized and dumbed down. Banks no longer care about a loan officer's assessment of whether a borrower is a good risk; everything they need to know is in the numbers. Baseball managers increasingly judge prospects by quantifiable statistics, not their "drive" or "hustle." "We are living in an age when dispersed discretion is on the wane," Ayres writes, even in such intimate settings as the doctor's office. Evidence-based medicine, the use of statistical models to guide diagnoses and treatment, is already changing how doctors practice. "Many physicians have effectively ceded a large chunk of control of treatment choice to Super Crunchers," he writes, and the trend will continue despite understandable resistance from the profession.
A couple decades ago, nearly everyone who studied history of science and technology had to read David Noble's Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, which argued that numeric control machine tools triumphed over competing systems in the 1950s and 1960s not because they delivered better results, but because they were powerful instruments for deskilling machinists. Machinists were highly paid, very skilled, and in the eyes of management, unacceptably powerful; numeric control offered the prospect of giving managers control over machine tools, and rendering machinists themselves irrelevant. (The book was extremely controversial; I interviewed a couple people who were in the book, and they hated it.) But idea that evidence-based medicine, quantitative analysis of personal performance or potential risk, etc. could serve the same purpose for white-collar workers is provocative, to say the least.
I’ve switched on Minuteur to ring at 4 a.m., and have also put my beloved travel alarm clock in my shirt pocket, set to go off at the same time. Since I’m still on West Coast time, there’s the chance I’ll just stay up until I can go through security and get to the gate, but in case I’ll fall asleep, I don’t want to wake up too late to get to my flight. That would just be too painful.
Gotta make sure not to fall asleep to any Kenny G or Quincy Jones: I’ll end up like Mack in Cars. Should switch over to Led Zepplin before too long.
[To the tune of Stevie Wonder, “Love Light In Flight,” from the album “The Woman in Red (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)”.]
Technorati Tags: airport, Dulles International Airport
We’re now back to the episode I walked in on. I might have to find some other place to work.
[To the tune of The Police, “Voices Inside My Head,” from the album “Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 2)”.]
Technorati Tags: airport, Dulles International Airport
I’m installed in a little cafe that has wifi, and a marathon of Friends playing- I’m beginning to suspect that it’s a DVD, because it occurs to me that I haven’t noticed any commercials. However, I seem have just been kicked off the network. Ah well. I’ll just have to go back to reading things on paper.
Though Lisa Kudrow is strangely compelling.
[To the tune of The Blue Nile, “I Would Never,” from the album “High”.]
Technorati Tags: airport, Dulles International Airport
The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul
© 2017 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.
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