Year: 2013

How Much Do You Need The Fourth Wall?

Alice Jones is weary of popular but unpredictable interactive shows like Sleep No More, where audience members are immersed in multi-faceted performances and can explore a five-floor set designed to look like the inside of an abandoned hotel:

There is still the very real risk of watching an usher for ages in case he turns out to be a Main Character (he didn’t). Pace is another potential pitfall. “The average journey time takes approximately 70 minutes, but you may go at your own pace,” states the laminated sheet. And if you get round in 55 minutes? Does that make you a bad audience member?

It’s difficult to give yourself over to theatre when your over-riding emotion is anxiety. Anxiety that you’re not seeing the crucial key that will unlock the piece; that you’re looking too hard at something that means nothing; that you might have to get involved at any moment; or that you’re missing out on something more exciting happening in another room. Too many times I have left shows only to discover that the best bit was a secret room I never found or a whispered encounter in a hidden phone box to which I was never privy. The feeling is disappointment mingled, it has to be said, with relief.

gPharmacist

Google can help us study drug interactions:

Much like Google Flu Trends reveals influenza outbreaks by tracking flu-related search terms, search queries about drug combinations and possible side effects—say, “paroxetine,” “pravastatin,” and “hyperglycemia”—might enable researchers to identify unanticipated downsides to medications, says bioinformatics researcher Nigam Shah of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “If a lot of people are concerned about a symptom, that in itself is valuable information.” [And although] many bad reactions to drugs never get reported to doctors, people talk about what’s bothering them all the time on a casual basis to their friends or online, notes computational biologist Nicholas Tatonetti of Columbia University, who was also involved with the study. “They don’t really know,” he says. “They’re just reporting on their symptoms, which is just a normal thing that humans love to do.”

Meme Against The Regime

A “Harlem Shake” video, filmed in “front of the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood”:

Amar Toor notes the proliferation of Harlem Shake protests in the Middle East:

The transformation from meme to message began late last month, when Egyptian police arrested four pharmaceutical students for publicly recording a “Harlem Shake” video in their underwear — an act that officials from Egypt’s conservative ruling party described as “scandalous.” A similar controversy erupted in Tunisia just days later, when education minister Abdeltif Abid promised to launch a vigorous investigation into a “Harlem Shake” video filmed at a high school in Tunis. Threatening swift punishment for those responsible, Abid condemned the act as an “insult to the educational message.”

As is so often the case, though, these crackdowns have only fanned the flames of discontent, emboldening progressive-minded youths to produce even more “Shake” videos, while underscoring the profound social divides that threaten to derail two of the region’s most fragile democracies.

In Egypt, some members of the Muslim Brotherhood released their own “Harlem Shake” video to insult opposition leaders, though they then subsequently tried to scrub it from the Internet.

The Catholic Hierarchy vs The Violence Against Women Act

You might have thought that a church that bars women from any institutional equality might be a little leery of actively opposing the VAWA. You would be wrong. Why on earth would Catholics oppose measures to protect women from domestic and other forms of violence? Because some of them might be gay:

For the first time since the original act became law in 1994, it spells out that no person may be excluded from the law’s protections because of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” — specifically covering lesbian, transgender and bisexual women. That language disturbs several bishops who head key committees within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that deal with, among other issues, marriage, the laity, youth and religious liberty.

“These two classifications are unnecessary to establish the just protections due to all persons. They undermine the meaning and importance of sexual difference,” the bishops said in a statement released by the USCCB on Wednesday. “They are unjustly exploited for purposes of marriage redefinition, and marriage is the only institution that unites a man and a woman with each other and with any children born from their union,” the statement continued.

So protecting lesbians and transgender and bisexual women from violence is now something Christians should oppose? The most vulnerable are somehow the least defensible? Do these bishops have even basic comprehension of the Gospels they read out loud every Sunday?

Instead of preventing the stoning of an adulteress, as Jesus did, they would have gone looking for bigger rocks.

America, The Arab World, And Iran

Marc Lynch points out that only “two Arab countries now see Iran as a good model (Lebanon and Iraq), Iran is viewed unfavorably in 11 out of 17 Arab countries, and large majorities of Arab publics sided with the opposition Green Movement over the Iranian government and disapprove of Iran’s role in Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf”:

This should not be taken as a green light for military action against Tehran, though. While support for a military strike with international legitimacy has grown significantly since 2006 in the polling, there isn’t a majority in favor in any Arab country. A 34-point increase in support for a military strike among Jordanians or a 24-point increase among Egyptians is significant as a trend. But approval of military action doesn’t crack 40 percent in any surveyed country, which is hardly an overwhelming mandate. Indeed, an American or Israeli military strike is probably the only thing that could rescue Iran’s regional image at this point — particularly if the regime is able to emerge with a Hezbollah-like narrative of success through survival.

Lynch worries about the growing sectarianism evident in the polling:

In Saudi Arabia, 92 percent of Shia reported a favorable view of Iran compared with 0 percent of Sunnis; in Bahrain, 76 percent approved of Iran compared with 4 percent of Sunnis. The same phenomenon appeared in almost every country with a significant Shia population

He goes on to argue that capitalizing on “sectarian hatred might be useful for regimes seeking to browbeat Shia populations into sullen acceptance of their subordination, but virtually guarantees enduring popular discontent and recurrent uprisings.”

Freelancing In The Digital Age, Ctd

Screen shot 2013-03-08 at 3.02.51 PM

Gregory Ferenstein, unlike Nate Thayer, has no problem with The Atlantic‘s approach to freelancing:

I’m thrilled there was an opportunity to be a poor freelance blogger … I would have done it for free. Putting CNN, The Atlantic, and Fast Company on my resume gave me extraordinary access to the top rungs of the business and political world. I was addicted to meeting fascinating people and writing (hopefully) compelling stories. It eventually gave me the credentials to get my first paid gig back at Fast Company.

I’m a libertarian. If it’s all voluntary, I don’t have a huge problem per se. What I would like to know, though, is: who is being asked to work for free on the business side? Or how many times does a business honcho there ask another businessman to donate his services for free? The question answers itself. And you know what that tells you: the management of the Atlantic now cares more about money than writing – and in the process, they are damaging the most precious commodity they have, editorial integrity. That’s been clear for a while now, as has the silencing of dissent among writers and commenters. Clay Shirky puts the systemic problem well, in a reply to Alexis:

I think you missed another of the reasons this blew up yesterday (the one you and I talked about in email a while back.) We don’t trust the Atlantic as much as we used to.

Your willingness to rent out your brand to Scientology, and then to silence the readers who tried to comment on that bit of infotainment (which, the official apology notwithstanding, was not a marketing mistake, but a conscious decision to censor your readers on behalf of your advertisers) put a bunch of us on edge, and we began to ask ourselves whether that was an out of character fuck-up, or a culture slowly going to shit.

I hope for the former, as you know, but you have to understand that when something like this happens, it’s not just that something went awry, it’s another thing that went awry at The Atlantic. I know the issues are complex and the editor was new, but there was a lot of circumstantial pleading for the advertorial cock-up as well. You guys have very little slack before people start publicly unsubscribing.

Here’s one personal anecdote.

The Atlantic.com reads, at times, like an IBM propaganda sheet (see the screen shot above – where, yes, the “sponsor content” is from IBM as well as the banner ad and video). Throughout the site, there are ads after ads by IBM, videos after videos, and “sponsored content” posts of horrible prose and worse jargon promoting the latest corporate management bullshit. And then I’m reading the new Atlantic cover-story on robotic medicine, by Jon Cohn, a superb journalist, edited by great editors. I do not doubt for an instant that this piece was fully ethical.

But then, on the first page or two, for the first time ever reading the Atlantic, my doubts arose. Why? The whole piece is centered on … wait for it … IBM’s super-computer Watson. Money quote:

IBM’s Watson—the same machine that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy—is now churning through case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, learning to make diagnoses and treatment recommendations. This is one in a series of developments suggesting that technology may be about to disrupt health care in the same way it has disrupted so many other industries. Are doctors necessary? Just how far might the automation of medicine go?

From the piece itself:

IBM didn’t build Watson to win game shows. The company is developing Watson to help professionals with complex decision making, like the kind that occurs in oncologists’ offices—and to point out clinical nuances that health professionals might miss on their own.

I still trust that the Atlantic did not run this cover-story as a way to curry favor with an advertiser that is also running “sponsor content” articles extolling their innovation. I do not believe this was product placement. But I can no longer say that those who wonder about that are crazy. When you rent out your name, prose, font, logo and pages to corporations’ “sponsored content” and then write cover-puff-pieces about the technology of exactly those companies, a reader has every reason to wonder whether they can trust a magazine that was only recently almost a symbol of such trust. As a deep lover of the Atlantic, it’s distressing, to put it mildly.

“Never Forget That They Were All Wrong” Ctd

Cheney was actually spot on about Iraq – in the early ’90s:

Sam Roggeveen offers his retrospective on the second war in Iraq:

My support was more hesitant than Sullivan’s, and I recall having many doubts. But having served as a mid-level official in the Defence Department through the ‘major combat operations’ phase of the war (that is, before the real Iraq war kicked off), I also recall giving a farewell speech to colleagues before moving to DFAT and saying that we had done the right thing.

I was wrong for a lot of reasons — strategic, political, humanitarian — but the most important is that the Iraq War did not meet the basic test of a just war, which allows for pre-emptive military action against an imminent threat, but not preventive war designed to stop such imminent threats from even emerging. The Iraq War, to my mind, was clearly a preventive war and thus constituted a crime of aggression.

I don’t suppose my support for the war mattered very much at the time, and although I now have a public forum to air my revised views, I doubt my change of heart matters much more now. I mention all of this only to encourage others to talk about their views of the Iraq War ten years after the invasion, and to tell readers what they continue to believe and what they have changed their minds about.