March 2013 – Page 55

Fair-Trade Phones?

Ben Schiller highlights an effort to make one:

Controversy has dogged the phone supply chain recently. Apple has been criticized for troubles at Foxconn, its enormous Chinese supplier. Campaigners like Global Witness and the Enough Project have shed light on African mines that fund warlords, and employ child labor (see also here). And, there are continuing stories about how e-waste recycling puts distant workers at risk, and pollutes the environment.

[Designer Bas Van Abel] thinks there’s demand out there for something different. Later this year, his company will start selling a phone that looks and acts much like other products–but comes with greater safeguards. FairPhone, which is a social enterprise that recycles profit for social ends, is sourcing minerals through nonprofit initiatives like the Conflict Free Tin Initiative and Solutions For Hope. It is choosing factories in China that meet high standards set by Labor Voices, an advocacy group. And it’s working with recycling groups, such as Closing The Loop. It wants to build a phone that fits “circular economy” principles, where valuable materials are easily extracted after-use, and repurposed.

“The Underground Library”

Design students in Miami are trying to bring libraries to subway commuters, and vice versa:

Responding to a revolution in the way we consume books, commuter ennui, and limited cell service on the subway, the idea is fairly straightforward. Use some of the advertising space on a train to display a number of current titles, and embed near field communication (NFC) chips behind each. When a title is swiped by a smartphone, it will send a 10-page preview of the book to your phone — just enough to kill some time and get you hooked — and let you know which library branches have a copy of the entire book. It could also include links to the library catalogue with up-to-date information on availability for when you next surface.

Kimberley Mok is intrigued:

It’s hard to tell whether compulsive smartphone readers would find this inconveniently frustrating or a good excuse to walk into their local branch — not to mention that the project’s success would hinge on the titles selected to be sampled. Nevertheless, it’s a potentially fascinating segue that would piggyback real paper books on top of the growing trend of electronic reading via smart devices — possibly helping to effectively offset declining numbers of people visiting mortar and brick libraries.

Drones By Default

Ambers contends that America’s “targeted killing policy is the best of all worst options for two reasons”:

One: The United States does not have a coherent and legitimate capture and detention policy. (Thank the CIA torture program, Abu Ghraib, Congress, and the Obama administration’s weak efforts to create one.) Two: Human intelligence collection has atrophied to the point where there are not enough people on the ground to facilitate the capture and detention of wanted targets.

This means the US over relies on technical intelligence, and on signals intelligence in particular. In Pakistan, it relies on tips from the Army and the ISI. Often, the member of al Qaeda core who’s been identified by the ISI is not, in fact, a member of al Qaeda core, but is instead a Pakistani Taliban or militant who is not sufficiently pro-Pakistan. The U.S. has gotten better at vetting these tips, but the policy generally is that it’s best not to let the sufficient be the enemy of the reliable. Yemen’s government does the same thing. The U.S. MUST rely on allied intelligence services because it cannot rely on its own. So: Bad guys exist. Can’t capture ’em. Can’t figure out who they are without help. What’s the answer? You kill them. If you oppose the policy of targeted killing of al Qaeda operatives, then you ought to support a viable detention system as well as a significant increase in our indigenous human intelligence capacity. Special operations forces and the CIA really would like to capture these guys and interrogate them, because these guys will often give up their comrades. But they can’t. So they don’t. And the president won’t take any chances in letting someone potentially dangerous slip through his grasp.

Makeup For Music

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Surveying the rise of auto-tune in the music industry, Lessley Anderson passes along a defense of the oft-used plug-in from its creator, Dr. Andy Hildebrand:

In interviews, Hildebrand handles the question of “is Auto-Tune evil?” with characteristic dry wit. His stock answer is, “My wife wears makeup, does that make her evil?” But on the day I asked him, he answered, “I just make the car. I don’t drive it down the wrong side of the road.” The T-Pains and Chers of the world are the crazy drivers, in Hildebrand’s analogy. The artists that tune with subtlety are like his wife, tasteful people looking to put their best foot forward.

Another way you could answer the question: recorded music is, by definition, artificial. The band is not singing live in your living room. Microphones project sound. Mixing, overdubbing, and multi-tracking allow instruments and voices to be recorded, edited, and manipulated separately. There are multitudes of effects, like compression, which brings down loud sounds and amplifies quiet ones, so you can hear an artist taking a breath in between words. Reverb and delay create echo effects, which can make vocals sound fuller and rounder. When recording went from tape to digital, there were even more opportunities for effects and manipulation, and Auto-Tune is just one of many of the new tools available.

A previous defense of auto-tune on the Dish is here.

The Brits Are Not Amused

Full warning: this comes from the Daily Mail:

At a mass in Buenos Aires last year, on the 30th anniversary of the invasion of the Falklands, the Pope referred to the British as ‘usurpers’ and called for the Argentine dead to be thanked. He said: ‘We come to pray for all who have fallen, sons of the Homeland who went out to defend their mother, the Homeland, and to reclaim what is theirs, that is of the Homeland, and it was usurped.’

‘The Homeland cannot exclude from its memory, anyone who was called; it has to take charge of so many hearts with scars, and say thank you to them, to those who stayed on the island or those submerged in the water, to all of them.’ At another anniversary service in 2008, he referred to those who sought to ‘de-Malvinise history and reality’.

Mental Health Break

Pogo goes to Kenya:

Previous Pogo on the Dish here. Update from a reader:

I just thought it might be worth mentioning that the girl singing in the video is named Ann. She is an orphan living at the Flying Kites children’s home in Njabini, Kenya. It’s a wonderful place that gives a lifetime home to orphaned children and runs a school for the local kids as well. My wife and I visited and volunteered there on our honeymoon and remain huge supporters. I’ve never met such a wonderful group of people and would encourage your readers to check them out.

Paul Ryan’s Shtick Begins To Wear Thin, Ctd

Noam Scheiber pinpoints why the press has turned on Ryan:

You can treat politics like a game, and you can assume reporters will, too. But you can’t go so far as to admit it’s a game. … The problem with Ryan’s new budget—in which he reverts to his pre-campaign position on Medicare cuts—is that it more or less concedes the whole campaign, with its righteous defense of Medicare, was a charade. Among the Washington press corps, this is a major no-no. Depending on the circumstances, reporters may be happy to enable these reinventions, but they are loath to acknowledge their role in them. Ryan basically rubbed their noses in it.

Earlier Dish on Ryan’s new budget here.

Crowdsourcing On Steroids, Ctd

A reader writes:

Can we discuss the Veronica Mars thing? Because this is a Warner Bros property! So what, everyone chips in their $100 or whatever, gets their t-shirt and whatnot, then buys a ticket to see the movie? So now the audience has paid to make the movie AND for the price of admission. For a WB movie. A huge corporation. Yes, they will be paying for advertising and distribution, but this is a con. They risk next to nothing and potentially reap all the profits on the back end.

That is, in my opinion, NOT what crowd sourcing is about. I do love that it’s getting a movie made that otherwise would never see the light of day, but come on. Crowd sourcing should be to support independent ventures. (And speaking of which, keep up the good work; I’m already in for $100 and intend to give at least that each year because The Dish is an independent venture that I can get behind crowd-sourcing!)

Another adds:

And guess what happens with all the money collected on Kickstarter above and beyond the $2 million goal? There’s no transparency, so we don’t know.

Pope Francis vs Clerical Privilege

Garry Wills, whose new book against the priesthood has just come out, might find a strange ally in Pope Francis. In so far as the new Pope seems determined to tackle the untouchable, remote power of clericalism, he is exactly what the church needs to rid itself of abuses embedded in seeing priests as a caste apart, beholden to no-one. From an old, somewhat inspiring interview:

BERGOGLIO: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests clericalize the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead had had a Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts of grace that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only baptism and had also lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One must not be afraid of depending only on His tenderness… Do you know the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah?

Q: I don’t remember it. Tell us.

BERGOGLIO: Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God broke into his life like a torrent.

He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the symbol of all the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of all those who are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only to tell all those people that the arms of God were still open, that the patience of God was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and nourish them with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him to Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward Tarsis.

Q: Running away from a difficult mission…

BERGOGLIO: No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his pre-ordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God and opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that God leads His people with the heart of a Father.

(Photo: Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio takes the Line A of the undergournd prior to the celebration of the traditional Tedeum mass at the Metropolitan Cathedral on May 25, 2008 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. By Emiliano Lasalvia/LatinContent/Getty Images.)

Month: March 2013