Month: April 2014

Alok Vaid-Menon considers the racial politics behind the apparent fad:

I grew up in a small Texas city, where my white peers called me a monkey. They told me that Indians grow our body hair earlier because we are closer to animals. I grew my first mustache at 11; I did not smile in photographs for years after. My desire to shave was not about wanting to become a man. It was about wanting to become white.

Now, at age 22, I sit in my Brooklyn apartment reading a New York Post story about how men in this city are paying up to $8,500 to obtain facial hair transplants to make their beards appear thicker. The article doesn’t mention race. But the first image that comes to mind is the white boys who taunted me growing up. Then, my dad told me, “One day they are going to be jealous of you.” I refused to believe him until now.

My generation inherited both our beards and our brownness in a post-9/11 era. We experienced a silent war – one that did not make it on the news – in the classrooms, the subways, the airports where we found ourselves under a new type of scrutiny. The brown on our skin: a new flavor of lethal. Its beard, even more of a threat. … Now white boys in Brooklyn are sewing hair onto their faces in the same city where brown boys still have scars from ripping it off.

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

This coming Sunday, April 6th at two o’clock – to celebrate The New York Botanical Garden’s seasonal exhibit, The Orchid Show: Key West Contemporary – three distinguished contemporary poets, Henri Cole, David Yezzi, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K.Smith will read the work of great American poets who made their home in Key West at different points in the 20th Century: Elizabeth Bishop in the 1940s, Richard Wilbur in the 1960s, and James Merrill in the 1980s. The reading will be in Ross Hall. The address is Bronx-River Parkway at Fordham Road, 2900 Southern Boulevard. The poems – as those we’ll post today and over the weekend demonstrate – are exquisite. For more details, see the Poetry Society of America’s event page here.

“April 5, 1974” by Richard Wilbur:

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

(From The Mind-Reader by Richard Wilbur © 1976 by Richard Wilbur. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Photo by Penny Higgins)

One of the main theories:

It is called the “motion dazzle hypothesis”, and it suggests predators are confused by zebras’ stripes and cannot understand their movement. Research published in the journal Zoology in 2013 used a simulated visual system to show that zebra stripes do interfere with visual perception. But this is a difficult hypothesis to test in the field.

Derek Mead flags a paper that finds evidence for a different theory:

Biting flies don’t like to land on stripes. The study team, led by Tim Caro of UC Davis, compared the habitats, predators, and other factors that might potentially make stripes useful for the seven extant equid species in Africa and Asia. Two things stood out: The three species with stripes are the only ones located in the same spot as blood-sucking, disease-carrying tsetse flies, and their width of their stripes match previous models showing the optimal stripe size for deterring flies. And to be clear, biting flies can be a huge problem: studies have shown that cattle in the US can lose 200-500cc of blood per day if biting flies aren’t controlled with pesticides, and they can also be serious disease vectors.

(Photo by Flickr user Tobias)

But mostly your children:

The Cornell University Food and Brand Lab study first evaluated the placement of cereal boxes in a small number of grocery stores in New York and Connecticut. Unsurprisingly, children’s cereals were placed on the bottom two shelves, while adult cereals were higher. But the researchers also found that the stares of the cartoon characters on children’s cereal boxes were fixed down at an angle of nearly 10 degrees, on average. On adult cereals, the gazes were nearly straight ahead.

And in preliminary tests, the method seems somewhat effective. When shown one of two boxes of Trix – one with the rabbit looking straight ahead and one where he looks down – adults surveyed showed higher brand trust and loyalty for the one with the straight-ahead gaze. (There was no parallel study of whether kids react better to being looked down on.) The researchers suggest that healthier brands should take on some of these tactics – and that parents avoid taking their kids down cereal aisles all together.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Amy Merrick considers the long and not-entirely-successful history of advertisers using feminist rhetoric to sell beauty products:

Almost as soon as images of women became prominent in the mass media, at the beginning of the twentieth century, marketers began trying to blend representations of women as independent and intelligent with traditional feminine notions of beauty. It was an awkward fit.

In 1924 – shortly after women got the right to vote, and long before Betabrand’s Ph.D.s – the Woman’s Copy Department at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency recruited distinguished women for a campaign for Pond’s cold cream, according to Kathy Peiss, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. Women such as Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who were chosen for their cultural significance rather than primarily for their beauty, gave testimonials about the benefits of Pond’s.

But many people didn’t understand the point, and consumers reported that they most liked the photographs of Princess Marie de Bourbon, a young and conventionally pretty endorser. In the Pond’s ads, the marketers “maintained that beautifying and achievement need not be mutually exclusive: caring for appearance could be seen as an aspect of women’s self-expression and dignity,” Peiss writes. “But this was a subtle and difficult argument to make, easily submerged in the celebration of female beauty as an end in itself.” For the most part, advertisers reverted to a simpler, more conventional message.

Ryan Avent sees them on the horizon:

The world is now blanketed in sensors, most of which are connected to the internet. The machines of the future will be able to draw on that information (or a lot of it, anyway) and use it to inform themselves about their surroundings. They will be able to talk to, learn from, and add to a wealth of data on What Things Are and What To Do With Them. And if they get stuck, they’ll be able to talk to humans. The stray object in the path that might once have immobilised a robot won’t immobilise it if the robot can ring up tech support and informed that it’s just a stray object, go around dummy.

It’s very hard to design a machine that can improvise when confronted by the unfamiliar or reason its way through most difficulties—just as it’s rare to find a human who can seamlessly navigate his way across all of America’s public roads, large and small, without some sort of guide. But just as any regular joe with access to Wikipedia can do a passable impression of someone with enormous intellectual powers, the extended mind of the cloud could lead to impressive improvements in robot capabilities.