Poor Kathleen Sebelius. We took another whack today at her lack of accountability … and then a reader who actually knows something about website development let her off the hook.
Ducks have feelings too. Which is more than you can for these asshole husbands from the not-so-distant past. Or Ted Cruz’s sucking on the teat of the federal government for a large chunk of his his healthcare, while opposing Medicaid expansion.
What if Buzzfeed had chronicled the Twentieth Century? What if you could really feel with your fingers what is on a flat-screen? Yes, online sex is gonna get even better.
Writer and director J.C. Chandor describes the real-life trauma that informs his latest film, All is Lost, about a man stranded on the open seas:
I had a very intense near-death experience when I was quite young. I was in a horrible, horrible car crash. I had gone from no one in my family ever dying when I was around or aware of it, when I was 19, to experiencing that. One of my best friends, who was driving me in a car with my three other friends, he fell asleep on a highway. We were on a trip, and it rolled the car seven or eight times. Unfortunately, the driver passed away. I was like—slam!—confronted with believing that I was dead. It was very intense. You know, pulling myself out of the wreckage of a car, pulling myself onto the grass on the median of a highway. It was very, very intense. I had been shielded from deep, emotional thinking almost throughout my whole life up to that point.
But then over the next 20 years of my life, I started to drift away. Almost like the reverse of what normally happens. The longer I got away from that event, I started to fall back into certain traps. Both of my grandmothers died in the years prior to me writing this, and I did have a very different view and experience with that. I ended up reexamining what, at one point in my life, I was very in touch with. I had lost that. By losing touch with that, I had started to take certain parts of my own life for granted.
My feeling was that there’s something fascinating about a guy toward the end of his life, who has presumably lived a pretty good life up until that point, just—what will you do to continue to fight for those days? What is it really like when you mourn your own death?
In an earlier interview, he made the connection explicit:
“This guy is essentially me in a weird way,” he said of the film’s central – and sole – character. “Someone asked me if it’s about my dad dying – my dad’s still alive. It’s about me dying. These are my feelings about this.”
Scientists are inching closer to the ability to scan brains for thoughts, dreams and memories through a series of processes known as “brain decoding.” Much of the research came out of advances from simpler work with MRI scans:
Decoding techniques interrogate more of the information [than MRIs] in the brain scan. Rather than asking which brain regions respond most strongly to faces, they use both strong and weak responses to identify more subtle patterns of activity. Early studies of this sort proved, for example, that objects are encoded not just by one small very active area, but by a much more distributed array.
These recordings are fed into a ‘pattern classifier’, a computer algorithm that learns the patterns associated with each picture or concept. Once the program has seen enough samples, it can start to deduce what the person is looking at or thinking about. This goes beyond mapping blobs in the brain. Further attention to these patterns can take researchers from asking simple ‘where in the brain’ questions to testing hypotheses about the nature of psychological processes — asking questions about the strength and distribution of memories, for example, that have been wrangled over for years.
Debate is already underway over how we might harness these techniques for market research – or the legal system, as demonstrated by the crime scene test in the above video:
No Lie MRI in San Diego, California … is using techniques related to decoding to claim that it can use a brain scan to distinguish a lie from a truth. Law scholar Hank Greely at Stanford University in California, has written in the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (Oxford University Press, 2011) that the legal system could benefit from better ways of detecting lies, checking the reliability of memories, or even revealing the biases of jurors and judges. Some ethicists have argued that privacy laws should protect a person’s inner thoughts and desires as private, but Julian Savulescu, a neuroethicist at the University of Oxford, UK, sees no problem in principle with deploying decoding technologies. “People have a fear of it, but if it’s used in the right way it’s enormously liberating.” Brain data, he says, are no different from other types of evidence. “I don’t see why we should privilege people’s thoughts over their words,” he says.
In all sincerity, Andrew, “Tomorrow” is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen you write.
I had a roommate for ten years who died just this past May. His ashes are setting on a shelf in my library just a few feet from me and I know he wanted me to plant them under a rose bush. It’s like I can’t decide which rose to choose. None are beautiful enough. I don’t want to let go.
I still haven’t been able to do it today. Next time I get to Ptown. I leave tomorrow.
Thanks to the death of DOMA, the federal government will also recognize [Darren Black Bear and Jason Pickel’s] marriage and provide them with a bounty of benefits. When DOMA was in force, it also applied to tribes; despite their general sovereignty, tribes could not compel the federal government to recognize gay marriages among Native Americans. With that roadblock abolished, Black Bear and Pickel should begin receiving federal marriage benefits immediately. …
Although this aspect of American marriage law remains vague for now, it may well be settled in the near future, as more and more tribes accept and even embrace same-sex marriage. Ron Whitener, executive director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington Law School, notes that many tribes have been quick to embrace gay rights, especially gay marriage. Homosexuality, Whitener says, has “a cultural presence among traditions of tribes,” and gay people are oftentimes considered “more spiritual” than heterosexuals. There’s also “a certain amount of ceremonial and sacredness about homosexuality among some tribes,” says Whitener,” leading to greater acceptance of gay tribal members.
Not all tribes, of course, are so progressive. Whitener believes that tribes in which Christianity plays a bigger role are more homophobic, while those with less exposure to the Bible are more tolerant of gays.
Though digital art is shared, liked, retweeted and embedded free-of-charge all over the web, the 20 pieces Lindsay Howard selected for this exhibition demonstrate a new level of comfort with bringing digital art offline and traditional media online. And, unlike the digital art shared and spread online, these pieces pulled in prices of $800 to $16,000 each.
The pieces [ranged] from Rafael Rozendaal’s interactive HTML and Javascript website ifnoyes.com to Molly Soda reading emails into a webcam for eight hours straight, “performing her online celebrity as a mirror that reflects Internet culture.” Rozendaal’s site sold for a final price of $3,500 and bidding on Soda’s video closed at $1,500. … The final sale of 16 of the 20 pieces totaled $90,600, a modest sum for fine art auctions. Regardless, the inclusion of digital art in a fine art auction shows changing attitudes towards new media that are so often found for free online.
In an interview, the curator explained what bidders got for their cash:
[Rafael Rozendaal] has this contract, it’s called the “Art Website Sales Contract,” which stipulates that the collector who purchases this piece must renew the domain annually, maintain the work, and keep it online, which is of primary importance. In exchange, the collector’s name goes in the title bar just above the URL, so it says ifnoyes.com in the collection of whatever the name is of the collector. … For the animated GIFs and videos, the collector will receive a USB drive with those files on them or a Mac Mini with the files on them. We wanted to keep the costs down for the auction and keep everything below $20,000, so we’re not including any of the hardware. But some galleries will sell you the whole monitor, which is really great and convenient.
But Molly Osberg contends that digital art is “impossible to really own, in the ‘hanging an original Picasso in your antechamber’ sense”:
This isn’t to say that digital work can’t move into the highbrow arts market. Artists like Cory Archangel, with his video game modifications and computer-generated works, have been catapulted to fame for their screen-based projects. The Cooper Hewitt museum recently acquired a piece of code as part of its permanent collection, MOMA now houses 14 video games, and members of Rhizome, which received 20 percent of the proceeds from Paddles ON [the auction], have sold GIF files at the world-famous Armory show in New York. … But the question of ownership — and how you get someone to pay notoriously high art-market prices for something as relatively immaterial as Molly’s webcam video or a 24-second YouTube clip – is still unsolved, and what the organizers of Paddles ON repeatedly called “the elephant in the room.”
Disney Research is experimenting with “an algorithm that takes 3-D geometry–bumps, ridges, textures, protrusions and more–and figures out the voltage necessary to simulate those physical features on a flat display, using nothing more than a series of vibrations”:
As researcher Ali Israr explains, in its most basic form, the system involves an insulated electrode paired with an electronic driver to create the voltage patterns. It has to be configured differently depending on the display involved, but in their testing the team successfully adapted the system to several off-the-shelf touch-sensitive panels.
In its current form, the software’s most effective when working from predefined maps of physical features–objects that have been paired with coordinates for their topography beforehand. Even here, the possibilities for single-purpose devices are obvious: envision … museum kiosks that let kids feel creatures found only at the bottom of the sea. The project also offers some interesting applications for visually-impaired users. But Israr thinks the vibrating touchscreens could be adapted for more commonplace activities too–browsing through Amazon, say, or surfing the web.
A customer undertakes a massage using pythons at Bali Heritage Reflexology and Spa in Jakarta, Indonesia. The snake spa offers a unique massage treatment which involves having several pythons placed on the customers body. The movement of the snakes and the adrenaline triggered by fear is said to have a positive impact on the customers metabolism. By Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.
Yuval Levin warns that it could be extremely high for the federal government:
[I]n the Obamacare exchanges, the subsidy system is intended to prevent people from feeling the effect of annual premium increases after the first year. The subsidies are designed to make sure that each recipient pays only a certain percentage of his income in premium costs. That percentage stays essentially the same year after year, so if premiums get more expensive the government covers the difference.
In other words, if premiums for coverage purchased in the exchanges were to double or triple in 2015 because of severe adverse selection, people eligible for subsides would still pay the same amount they did in 2014 (assuming their incomes didn’t change) and the federal government would pay for the entirety of the increase. Subsidized beneficiaries would therefore not feel the effect and the healthy among them would not necessarily have much reason to flee the exchanges.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 86 percent of the people who buy coverage in the exchanges in 2014 will receive subsidies. The technical problems limiting enrollment may mean that figure is even higher (since the incentive to enroll is much greater if you’re eligible for subsidies than if you’re not). Those individuals would not feel the effect of second-year premium spikes, which means the result of such spikes, if they were to happen, would likely not fall into the usual pattern of an adverse-selection spiral.
Instead, the sort of severe adverse selection the exchanges may experience would dramatically increase federal spending and would drive unsubsidized exchange participants (other than those in very poor health) and many insurers out of the exchanges.
Matthew Power profiles Brandon Bryant, who once operated drones over Iraq and Afghanistan from his work station in Nevada:
Bryant’s second shot came a few weeks after targeting the three men on that dirt road in Kunar. He was paired with a pilot he didn’t much like, instructed to monitor a compound that intel told them contained a high-value individual—maybe a Taliban commander or Al Qaeda affiliate, nobody briefed him on the specifics. It was a typical Afghan mud-brick home, goats and cows milling around a central courtyard. They watched a corner of the compound’s main building, bored senseless for hours. They assumed the target was asleep.
Then the quiet ended. “We get this word that we’re gonna fire,” he says. “We’re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They’ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.” The drone crew received no further information, no details of who the target was or why he needed a Hellfire dropped on his roof.
Bryant’s laser hovered on the corner of the building. “Missile off the rail.” Nothing moved inside the compound but the eerily glowing cows and goats. Bryant zoned out at the pixels. Then, about six seconds before impact, he saw a hurried movement in the compound. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person.”
Bryant stared at the screen, frozen.
“There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.
“And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”
Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.
If they’d had a few more seconds’ warning, they could have aborted the shot, guided it by laser away from the compound. Bryant wouldn’t have cared about wasting a $95,000 Hellfire to avoid what he believed had happened. But as far as the official military version of events was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The pilot “was the type of guy to not argue with command,” says Bryant. So the pilot’s after-action report stated that the building had been destroyed, the high-value target eliminated. The report made no mention of a dog or any other living thing. The child, if there had been a child, was an infrared ghost.
Previous Dish on drones here, here, and here. A thread examining the morality of drone warfare is here.
The Dish 