magic wands: new AR app allows for “enchanting translations”. casting better spells getting easier with every roll.

This year’s worthiest sequel to the Harry Potter series may be an app. Word Lens debuted on potentially millions of screens just in time for the final holiday shopping weekend. The timing of magical elves from the north pole.

Using either the short-range Apple Touch or long-range Apple iPhone the new augmented reality app Word Lens allows users to point their hand at a sign written in an unfamiliar tongue and “presto change-o!,” their eyes are enchanted: they can now navigate a foreign world. (The World Lens site asks, rhetorically: “Why are people calling Word Lens the magic arrival of the future?”)

The translations will be fairly accurate for as long as there’s money to be made in global markets. That is, for a while. Every language costs a few dollars more. Dialects to follow shortly, no doubt.

ideas/technology

Of dependencies, complexity and what, if any, is our destiny.

The other day I was talking with colleagues about the way that we use tools to overcome our physiological limitations and, in particular, how we have begun to use computers to compensate for our cognitive limits. One of my colleagues then described our increasing reliance on machines to carry out certain mental tasks as “devolution.”

If evolution describes those adaptations that a species undergoes in order to thrive, devolution are those adaptations which put a species at risk.

But which mental tasks are integral to our future survival are not obvious. The challenges we faced yesteryear are not necessarily the ones we will confront tomorrow. If we are to say which tasks are worth carrying out “the old way”, we must first consider what are our greatest existential threats today.

I believe they are now primarily of a social nature.

At our current stage of evolution, we humans are not only adapting to our environment, but, also, adapting our environment to ourselves. This feedback loop means that how we define humanity must also include our environment: our tools, ourselves. (For more on this concept, see homo faber or the Gaia philosophy.)

We can no more separate human from machine than we can separate human from language. Nurture is part of our nature. So are politics.

It’s been noted that we humans have a difficult time thinking about the future. This blind spot could be one of the reasons why we are struggling to coordinate a proper response to global warming. But this very dilemma points to how inextricably linked we are to our machines – and to each other.

Without technology we cannot “see” – let alone understand – the problem of global warming. Without each other, we cannot respond to it.

Against this backdrop, any tool that allows us to better relate to one another is a welcome adaptation. Likewise, any tool that allows us to both exploit and preserve our environment.

If there is a threat of devolution in our culture, it is the notion that we can and should fend for ourselves. Rugged individualism is incompatible with the survival of a species.

ideas/nature/technology

David Rothkopf on the “rich dark chocolaty center” of U.S. politics

David Rothkopf, astute and witty as ever, discussing the various political centers, from the expedient to the principled center, from the independent center to the money center:

Then, there is the money center (also known as the rich dark chocolaty center or the creamy nougat center or just as the delicious candy center). This is the center where big time donors live. Watch closely and you’ll see plenty of behavior, including likely upcoming White House appointments, that show they are acutely aware they may have alienated this group during the past couple years and they want them back. The money center is, of course, Wall Street and shifting to this center means adopting policies that are calculated to open their wallets come campaign time. These policies tend not to be made on a left-right spectrum but rather on a top-to-bottom scale and they always benefit the top. (Or in the case of the estate tax provisions in the current deal, the tippy tippy top.)

business/power

Things I learned from watching the most recent – and only the most recent – Harry Potter movie.

  1. Some movies, indeed some movie series, can be enjoyed starting with the final act on. Harry Potter is not one of them.
  2. Movies for kids now use techniques previously restricted to horror movies, thrillers.
  3. If you’ve built a large enough fan-base, your plot and dialogue can be almost entirely esoteric (impenetrable) even as you command a mass-market budget.
  4. All movies are dreamlike but some are as nonsensical as dreams.
  5. The first Harry Potter movie (book) must have been very good – charming – for its adaptation of magic (which is always magical thinking) as both a crutch and the birthright of every child. The undertow of imagination.
  6. Burying an elf – a body the size of an infant, wrapped in a white sheet – is a surprisingly effective conveyance for mourning the loss of childhood innocence.
  7. Movies are about bodies more so than they are about ideas (values, beliefs); given the laughter certain moments of sexual tension elicited in the audience, I would guess that much of the Harry Potter film series is about the changing bodies of the protagonists.
  8. Perhaps this series is especially effective at marrying the para-text of the actors’ real adolescence with the primary text of the fictional narrative as the storyline is driven by the fear with which the adult contemplates the end of childhood – a fear that is then communicated and/or transferred to adolescents who cannot know what death is but for whom eros is life itself.
  9. (the para-text of the actor’s life: everything you know about the actor before the lights dim and the projector starts; the actor’s fame or notoriety, his or her body of work; John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Robert Downey Jr. in Chaplin and Iron Man, Madonna in Who’s That Girl, etc.)
  10. Depicting the desire of young people as a good thing is an interesting affront to a society that talks to itself with promise rings and celibate vampires.
  11. Blockbuster movies must invoke and repeat previous blockbuster movies: chase sequences, gunfights and the highly codified (“formulaic”) language of special effects, both visual and sonic; the stuff YouTube supercuts are made of.
  12. I got the feeling the original text, the book series, has a great deal of fun with words – riddles, spells, names. That’s awesome. I wish this movie had more fun with words.
      13. movies & television/work

Russian white nationalist street gangs, terrorism and post-Soviet political culture. Also, the confederate flag.

Charles Clover has written a brilliant, daring report on terrorists in Russia who are inspired by racist nationalism and financed by officials of the Russian state.

Opening with a shocking account of a ritual dismemberment taped and distributed on the Internet as propaganda, the well-sourced investigation is punctuated with insightful observations:

There are many gangs who hang out in the high-rise, low-income flats built in the 1960s and 1970s on the outskirts of most Russian cities. It is a world of drugs and warring subcultures of youths, and at the top of that grim heap are the skinheads, the kings of ultra-violence, motivated by hate, alcohol and, in many cases, mental illness. The NSO was made of the same raw materials.

On the nexus between the Russian state and skinhead street gangs – or, urban terrorist squads:

…The NSO case has shed a great deal of light on the murky world of Russia’s skinhead street gang members, even if not all of them survived to testify in court. The NSO was run as an underground, disciplined terror unit with a tight, cell-like organisation, typical of experienced terror groups. Each regional cell is handled by a kurator, or handler, in charge of men who have undergone military training, some with firearms and explosives.

The NSO has emerged not only as a terror group with a significant propaganda function, but most importantly, one with numerous and not altogether transparent relationships with Russia’s political and law-enforcement establishment. While the source of the money in Bazilev’s account will, in all likelihood, never be properly investigated, it can be surmised that it came from someone with a great deal of power and influence – probably the same person who appears to have befriended the ­organisation, given it protection and, possibly, had Bazilev killed.

…There is an implicit contract between skinhead gangs and the authorities under which the state turns a blind eye to violence by skinhead groups, in exchange for their not getting involved in politics.

Belov said that a senior interior ministry official in the city of Bryansk once told him: “Go ahead and beat up black people. We will pretend that we don’t see that. Just don’t get involved in politics.” Belov violated that implicit law.

In a fleeting moment, we happen upon the inconvenient truth of a similar racket in the U.S.:

…Maksimov, a rather garrulous person, invited me to his favourite bar to discuss the photos and the rather odd picture they present – skinheads seemingly working for the police to break up opposition demonstrations and protect counter-demonstrators. The bar is the Grease Club on Malaya Ordynka Street, a few blocks from the venerable Tretyakov Gallery. Most strikingly, in some sort of homage to international racism, it is hung wall-to-wall with American confederate flags. The clientele are tattooed, muscular youths with buzz cuts or shaven heads. “Everyone in this place is a right [as in politically right] person,” said Porthos, grinning and flashing a little Hitler salute.

Finally, on the lessons of history when it comes to this tactic:

…Like the Pakistani secret service’s indulgence of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, intended as a directed outlet for Islamic radicalism, the movement has slipped from the grasp of those who would rein it in. Instead of creating a docile manipulable movement, it has unleashed a generation of radicals.

Now, let’s return to the question that has marked if not marred American political culture for the last decade: should terrorists be considered criminals engaged in political acts or political actors engaged in acts of war?

Not only does the evidence (who, what, where, how, why) overwhelmingly support the former, it is the only course which renders illegitimate the use of terrorism as a political tactic.

people/power

The Chamber of Commerce versus the Business Roundtable

The Financial Times:

Amex chief calls for jobs taskforce

By Francesco Guerrera and Suzanne Kapner in New York

Published: December 5 2010 22:00

Ken Chenault, the chief executive of American Express, has called for an alliance of business leaders and politicians to find concrete ways to create millions of jobs in the US and kick-start the anaemic economic recovery.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Chenault, who has met frequently with President Barack Obama and his aides, proposed a special commission to set a target for new jobs and specific measures to reduce stubbornly high unemployment.

“I’d like to see an industry taskforce between the public and private sectors to determine what businesses need to create jobs,” he said. He added that it would be essential for any public-private taskforce to set a specific target and a timeframe for the new jobs in order to force government and business to take tangible steps to reduce unemployment.

Mr Chenault’s proposal was given added urgency by Friday’s official figures showing that employers added fewer-than-expected jobs in November, pushing the unemployment rate to 9.8 per cent of the workforce.

The call for a truce between the White House, which has attacked companies’ reluctance to invest in the economy, and a business community that has been calling for more government help, was echoed in other parts of corporate America.

The Business Roundtable, the trade organisation for some of the largest US companies including Amex, said Mr Chenault’s proposal was “very intriguing” and could be debated at a meeting of its members this week. The White House declined to comment.

Mr Chenault, whose company collects data on millions of retail transactions, said that high unemployment was the biggest obstacle to a faster economic recovery.

In America, there are very wealthy nihilists but there are also very wealthy realists. Chenault and his supporters in the realist camp could reform not just the American economy (leaning on a Congress that is all too clearly for rent), but also the Republican Party which has lost the plot, entirely.

business/power

We are bacteria all the way down.

From Burkhard Bilger’s savvy report on fermentation and underground food culture in the U.S., sadly available only as an abstract to non-subscribers:

Modern hygiene has prevented countless colds, fevers, and other ailments, but its central premise is hopelessly outdated. The human body isn’t besieged [by microbes]; it’s saturated, infused with microbial life at every level. “There is no such thing as an individual,” Lynn Margulis, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me recently. “What we see as animals are partly just integrated sets of bacteria.”

ideas/nature/people

If you know any Italians, please forward this anecdote to them.

An anecdote that must be shared:

Their favorite activity, however, seems to be holding joint press conferences. At one of their most memorable appearances together, in Moscow, in 2008, a Russian journalist named Natalia Melikova asked Putin about his apparent marital trouble and rumored romance with the young and indecently plastic gymnast-cum-parliamentarian Alina Kabaeva. When asked about the liaison, Putin’s face hardened. “There is not a word of truth in this story,” he said. Berlusconi, giggling, regarded the exchange. When Putin had finished answering, Berlusconi cocked his hands, and, imitating a gun, fired with a silent “Pow! Pow!” at Melikova. It had only been a year and a half since Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, had been shot in her Moscow elevator, and Melikova was reduced to tears. On the dais, Berlusconi laughed, and Putin nodded.

journalism/people

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the U.S. State Department for the next month.

When I first read about the process by which the New York Times sorted out what leaked documents they would publish and how, I thought: “Wow, it must have been a very busy week/weekend at the State Department” as they did their best to negotiate which details should be redacted.

When the surprisingly substantive reactions from world leaders began to circulate, I thought: “Wow, they must be very busy at the State Department” making calls to maintain relationships now being tested by adversaries.

Reading this morning some of the details re: the Russian diplomatic cables, I thought: “Wow, think of all the intelligence the State Department must be gathering now as all of the players react to the publication of their positions.”

ideas/people

De-worming pills for $.50 or a laptop for $100?

Kentaro Tomaya on why high technology, in and of itself, doesn’t solve the problems that lead to poverty:

Does a hundred dollars for a computer make sense when $0.50 per year, per child for de-worming pills could reduce the incidence of illness-causing parasites and increase school attendance by 25 percent?

The disparity between what donors care about and what recipients of aid might need speaks to the cultural gap between have’s and have-not’s. To make donors happily pay for the basics of enfranchisement requires that donors learn to appreciate what they have come to take for granted.

We love our computers. We want to share that love. It’s been too long since we felt a similarly strong affection for clean water and basic, universal education.

ideas/people

Eleven years ago, five years ago, playing The New World. Also, the video.

True story. Our band Pepito began in San Francisco, California on a Thanksgiving day in 1999, with a brand new Blueberry iMac, a cracked copy of Reason and a then four year old copy of SoundEdit16. That night, we had dinner at the Indian Oven in the Lower Haight. I was 26 years old.

Ana and I played our last show as Pepito on November 16 in 2005 at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Spain. Here is footage of us performing our last song – recorded, I believe by Celeste Carrasco:

Our last line: “The New World is a tense, it never goes away.”

Here is a video of those concert visuals, dubbed with the album audio track:

This music video is downloadable.

Finally, some production notes for the video from our now shuttered web site, courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:

Made with an iSight camera, Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, GCam, a Canon Powershot still camera, a shower, paper, pencils and plenty of time. Filmed on location in our apartment in Madrid, Spain and El Buen Retiro. The “wad-of-paper” effect used after the lyric “waiting for a name” was shamelessly lifted from Charles Stone’s 1992 video for the Black Sheep. The still images of Super NES glitches in the final section were extracted from Johny Rogers’ collection of NES glitches at Archive.org.

I will try to find and post them all in the coming months.

art/music

Bleeding heart versus what, exactly?

Apparently, I’m a bleeding heart. Twice in two days I’ve sat through tear-jerkers; one about charter schools in New York City and a second about a US Navy rescue during the Vietnam war. The evidence would suggest that I derive pleasure from empathizing with strangers.

Does the converse necessarily hold? Are there adults who seek out experiences that stimulate antipathy? Are there people who enjoy hatred? I think the answer is fairly obvious.

Which is not to say that the two feelings are always so distinct. Consider the case of pity. But is compassion pity? No more than a stick insect is a plant. Thus, Nietzsche is right to criticize pity as an irresponsibility:

Pity is the practice of nihilism. To repeat: this depressive and contagious instinct crosses those instincts which aim at the preservation of life and at the enhancement of its value. It multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable, and is thus a prime instrument of the advancement of decadence: pity persuades men to nothingness!

Of course, so does hatred. As we struggle to define what it means to be American, the opposition is not then between those who are irrational bleeding hearts and those who are stone cold realists but rather between nobility and nihilism.

Either you strive for greatness or you don’t.

ideas/people/power

The female executive who gave Walt Disney his big break.

Meet Margaret Winkler, aka MJ Winkler.

Since this was [a] male-dominated industry, Peggy reasoned that she should avoid any indication of a female connection to her company. She cleverly chose the initials “M” for Margaret, and “J” because it just sounded good. Within a year, the M. J. Winkler Company was established as a quality short subject distributor of cartoons, comedies, and travelogues. But Felix was the biggest attraction with the biggest problems. Peggy started having conflicts with Pat Sullivan and started looking for a new type of cartoon as a backup. It was at this time that she saw Walt Disney’s pilot titled, Alice’s Wonderland. She was impressed with its inventiveness and quickly commissioned a series of six films without ever having seen Disney’s facilities. The irony is that Disney’s first studio was nothing more than a wooden one car garage behind his Uncle Robert’s home in Hollywood.

business/people

Insourcing term papers. (Yeah, another story on paper mills. It’s a trend.)

Yet again, a fascinating story on essay mills. This one challenges – albeit by anecdata – an assumption I’d made earlier about who is paying for these papers and inverts my modest proposal about outsourcing the work to English teachers in foreign countries:

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

It hadn’t occurred to me that it was Americans who were being tasked by foreign students to write these papers.

business/technology

Schneier on paper mills, testing: the value of a diploma vs. the knowledge it assures.

Bruce Schneier:

Fundamentally, [essay plagiarism] is a problem of misplaced economic incentives. As long as the academic credential is worth more to a student than the knowledge gained in getting that credential, there will be an incentive to cheat.

There’s an implicit, vague critique of higher education here to which I am sympathetic. But, unfortunately, many students are too early in their careers to know how to value a knowledge they will only be able to use later on; in many cases, only many years later.

Certainly you can test for knowledge via examinations (MCATS, the Bar) which test recall and, through simulations, applied knowledge. But what would such an entrance or licensing exam look like for the humanities? Would you hire ethicists to fill out the testing board? How would you structure a test for joining civil society?

Previously on essay mills, outsourcing.

business/technology