Month: February 2014

Viva La Resistance

This passage from John Dewey’s 1934 book Art as Experience piques Nick Carr’s interest:

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. Impulsion forever boosted on its forward way would run its course thoughtless, and dead to emotion. For it would not have to give an account of itself in terms of the things it encounters, and hence they would not become significant objects. The only way it can become aware of its nature and its goal is by obstacles surmounted and means employed; means which are only means from the very beginning are too much one with an impulsion, on a way smoothed and oiled in advance, to permit of consciousness of them. Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates irritation and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation.

Carr comments that “Dewey here provides us with a powerful way of examining and interrogating technologies”:

A tool that simply smooths and oils our way, that speeds us to the execution of an impulsion, has a deadening effect. It removes us from the world and hence from the struggle with the world and its objects that gives definition to the self. The best tools are the ones that expand and extend our contact with the world, that give us more not fewer frictional surfaces. Dewey’s teaching runs directly counter to our assumption that we should seek out the technologies that offer us the greatest convenience and ease.

Our Need For Speed

http://youtu.be/uLt7lXDCHQ0&start=67&end=180

Since the early days of Hollywood, movie editing has picked up the pace considerably:

In the 2007 thriller The Bourne Ultimatum, as the critic Michael Phillips has noted, the set piece in which Bourne must dispatch a rival sent to kill him lasts approximately 109 seconds. From the time he crashes through the window to when he finally subdues the assassin, there are roughly 122 cuts—less than a second per cut.

Still well above the threshold of visual perception, but in filmic terms, it is the kind of pacing we once associated with, at its extreme, the visually and psychically jarring “montage” film-within-a-film in Alan Pakula’s 1974 conspiracy film The Parallax View. “The miracle,” writes Phillips of Bourne, “is that it’s not simply sickening to watch.”

As James Cutting, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, has noted, where average shot lengths during the “classical Hollywood age” timed in around the languorous 10-second mark, today’s films are lucky to hit the five-second mark. The average shot length for the entire running time of Quantum of Solace was 1.7 seconds. … While there are pragmatic reasons Hollywood likes shorter cuts—they are easier to edit, for one—Cutting says they also seem perfectly engineered to capture human attention. “Every time there’s a cut in a film,” he says, “it forces you to reallocate your attention.” With each new scene, the eyes typically move toward the center of the screen: What have we here? It is a virtually involuntary process.

Older, Wiser, Slower?

Susan Brink surveys research that investigated the question, “Who has the better memory: the young person who knows a little and remembers all of it, or the older person who has learned a lot and forgets a little of it?”

It could be that older, wiser heads are so chock full of knowledge that it simply takes longer to retrieve the right bits. …

[Researcher Michael] Ramscar created computer models simulating young brains and older brains. He fed information into both models but added buckets more information to the model meant to simulate an older brain. “I could see precious little evidence of decline in [the models of] healthy, older people,” he says. “Their slowness and slight forgetfulness were exactly what I’d expect” because with more to draw on, there are more places to search, and there’s more information to search through to find an answer.

Benedict Carey digs in (NYT):

[T]he new study is not likely to overturn 100 years of research, cognitive scientists say.

Neuroscientists have some reason to believe that neural processing speed, like many reflexes, slows over the years; anatomical studies suggest that the brain also undergoes subtle structural changes that could affect memory. Still, the new report will very likely add to a growing skepticism about how steep age-related decline really is.

It goes without saying that many people remain disarmingly razor-witted well into their 90s; yet doubts about the average extent of the decline are rooted not in individual differences but in study methodology. Many studies comparing older and younger people, for instance, did not take into account the effects of pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease, said Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at Stanford University.

Thomas Hills weighs in:

Years of research have shown that older people have larger vocabularies than younger people, other things being equal. In their paper, Ramscar and associates show that even this we’ve probably underestimated, because older people tend to know a lot of very low frequency words such as “zaftig” and “arroyo” and “byzantine”, words that are difficult to test because there are so many of them. Younger people tend to know fewer of these words.

Unemployment Across America

dish_metromap

Richard Florida elaborates on the above map, which predicts the “time frame for return to peak employment in metro areas across the U.S.”:

My own view is that we are in the midst of a long-run Great Reset, one that is slow moving and uneven across cities and regions. A report [PDF] released at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors last week – though it was spun optimistically, with predictions of job growth in 357 of the country’s 363 metropolitan areas – lends support to this view. Just a third of all metros (121) are projected to have job creation rates of 2 percent or more. And while 40 percent are predicted to have unemployment rates below 6 percent during 2014, a worryingly high proportion – 35 percent – will see their rates hover above 7 percent. …

Many of the places that have already recovered, in gray and blue, are located in one of the two pillars of the new economy – the energy belt of Texas and the Great Plains, and knowledge hubs like Boston, New York, the Baltimore-Washington region, and the Bay Area. The places that likely won’t return to full employment until 2016-7 (yellow) or 2018 and beyond (red) include former manufacturing hubs of the Rustbelt; poorer, de-industrialized East Coast metros like Camden, New Jersey; and old Southern manufacturing cities like Birmingham, Alabama.

Art By Algorithm

http://twitter.com/AmIRiteBot/status/427384696918794241

Leon Neyfakh profiles Darius Kazemi, a botmaker whose “dozens of projects have won him admirers among a range of people so wide it suggests the world doesn’t quite have a category for him yet”:

Kazemi’s first foray into the field was called Metaphor-a-Minute. The way it worked was simple: The bot would pull nouns and adjectives from an online dictionary called Wordnik, and arrange them in a particular order so that each tweet presented a metaphor both bizarre and fleetingly plausible. (Examples: “a premonition is a warren: defenseless and tacit,” “an impression is a mucus: nondomestic, rootlike.”) The effect was that of a very smart but helplessly confused alien being trying to make sense of the English language. To date, the account has generated nearly half a million metaphors.

From there Kazemi was off to the races.

He made a RapBot that used a rhyming database to write hip-hop verses. He created Amirite, a hammy jerk of a bot that makes corny, often nonsensical “am I right” jokes that sometimes strike a nerve: “Wendy Davis? More like Trendy Davis, amirite?” His Startup Generator lampooned tech culture with a constant stream of dubious business ideas (“Paypal for dropouts”).

More recently he created his most popular bot to date, Two Headlines, which crawls the latest news stories on Google, picks two at random, and switches important keywords to generate a series of broken windows into the popular conversation: “Beirut seeks love advice from Katy Perry”; “Iran Is Working On Smart Contact Lenses That Can Monitor Your Body’s Health.” Bogost now considers himself part of Kazemi’s growing fan base, waiting for the next bot to be born. “You have a favorite comedian or favorite artist and you look forward to what they say, because you want to see the world through their eyes,” [professor Ian] Bogost said. “The same kind of thing is happening with Darius.”

Super Fail

Jonathan Mahler calls this year’s Super Bowl “a big fat failure”:

As of Tuesday, there were still 18,000 tickets available to the game. Hotel rates in New York City — and East Rutherford and Secaucus, for that matter — are plummeting. Weird. Who could have predicted that paying $2,000 to stand in the freezing cold and watch a football game might not be everyone’s idea of a great winter getaway?

Like all major sporting events, this one started with plenty of hooey about all of the money that it would generate for its host city (or cities). Random, obviously overstated estimates were thrown around. An economic-benefits study commissioned by the host committee — what major sporting event would be complete without an economic-benefits study? — reportedly put the number at $600 million. I say “reportedly” because the host committee has refused to release the study to the public, which tells you everything you need to know about the oil gusher of cash currently showering heretofore unimaginable prosperity on the New York metropolitan area.

On Thursday, Jesse Lawrence checked in on ticket sales:

Today, the average list price for Super Bowl tickets is now $2,465, a decline of 34% since the morning of Conference Championship Sunday [January 19th].  While the rate of decline is now much slower, it is still declining by $50-$100 each day.  The ticket decline has not discriminated to any areas of MetLife Stadium, with one exception: Club Seats.  The Chase and Lexus Clubs are located along the mezzanine sidelines on the east and west sides of the stadium. Both clubs offer the same amenities and services, including indoor food and beverage service.  While weather concerns have been a major culprit for the dropping prices,  Club prices have been immune to the elements, just like the lucky people that that will be sitting there. Since last Monday, Club Corner and Club Center seats have only declined by 6.61% and 9.34% respectively, to their current averages of $3,364 and $5,163.

Update from a reader:

Saying the Super Bowl is a failure because not enough people are buying tickets to the game is like saying Christmas is a failure because not enough people went to church.

Another:

To clarify, the Super Bowl is completely sold out. It is the secondary ticket broker market that has declining sales. There will be a packed house tomorrow night.